I came to wedding photography through an unusual door. My early years were spent assisting fashion photographers in Paris and Milan — learning the architecture of light from people who treated a studio as a laboratory and an image as an argument. I learned to read a room before I entered it, to understand what the camera could see that the eye could not, to be ruthlessly selective and patient in the same breath.

But fashion left me cold in one particular way: nothing I photographed mattered to anyone personally. The images existed to sell something, to illustrate a season, to be replaced by next month's shoot. I found myself drawn, almost against my own plans, to the only kind of photography where the stakes were genuinely, irreversibly high — where the people in the frame would one day show these images to their grandchildren and say, this is who we were.