Way Up North, Akademiestraße 13, Vienna (2026)

18/06/2026

The keynote rollout for València continues with Sebastian Mandryka, who runs SuperWeddings out of Spain. Polish by birth, photographer, videographer, content creator, marketing strategist, and, for what it's worth, also a working DJ.

Seb and WUN go back to 2017. He shot the reel for our Rome edition, before most of the people reading this had ever heard of WUN. He's been on our radar since.

The most successful wedding photographers and filmmakers are often the ones the rest of the industry doesn't talk about. No funnel, no education course, no coaching DMs in your inbox at 8am every morning trying to sell you their winter program. They do the work. They book the clients. They put 400 weddings on the books in the time it takes other photographers to launch their first preset pack. Seb is one of them.

The other part connects to the theme: Seb is one of the photographers furthest ahead on the technology side of this industry. He's weaving AI into his work, into the business behind the work, into the way couples will find him in the next five years. Most wedding photographers and filmmakers are watching AI nervously. He's already using it.

There's a side of The New Wave about photographers learning to use the tools. Seb interprets that. The rest of the line-up will benefit from hearing him do it out loud.

Welcome to the show, Seb. We owed you a stage since Rome.

17/06/2026

The keynote rollout for València continues with Tatiana Huber, who runs AISLEGLAM. Familjen will recognise her. She's been flying in for the last few WUN editions as a guest, and València is where she moves up to the stage. Her off-camera handheld flash technique has gone viral in the photographer education space over the last year. The stage was the next step.

Tatiana didn't come up through photography directly. She started as a makeup artist at seventeen, worked in the beauty industry for nearly a decade, transitioned into beauty photography, and only then turned the camera toward weddings. That's a long apprenticeship in light, skin, retouching, and what makes someone look like the best version of themselves. It shows.

AISLEGLAM is one of the few wedding brands whose Instagram aesthetic is closer to the perfume ads she grew up looking at than to any other wedding photographer's feed. The polish is real and engineered. The goal is to deliver people the version of themselves they'd want to be remembered as.

There's a side of The New Wave we haven't named yet in this rollout. Most of the conversation so far has been about photographers moving toward quieter, slower, more documentary work. There's another wave moving the opposite direction: photographers pushing further into editorial precision, magazine aesthetic, viral teachable techniques, and the polish that high-end clients are willing to pay for. Tatiana is at the front of that wave. The community needs both sides of the conversation.

Welcome to the show, Tatiana. Worth all those flights.

16/06/2026

The keynote rollout for València continues today with Wanda Martin, based in London and the first Hungarian photographer to present at WUN since we started in 2015. Eleven years on and we're still adding firsts.

Wanda came up in editorial rather than weddings, with a portfolio built out of fashion campaigns, music photography, and portraiture, and a list of mastheads that includes Vogue, Dazed, i-D, and Numéro. She's recently been bringing that same editorial eye to weddings, and the photos sit closer to her fashion campaigns than to anyone else's wedding work.

Her father, Gábor Martin, is also a photographer. A few years ago, she discovered an old archive of his photographs from 1970s socialist Hungary, of youth and parties and dance floors, and realised her own 2010s London photographs of the same subjects looked almost identical. They published the work together as a book, The Ballad of Eternal Youth.

There's a New Wave inside our community that nobody talks about much, but it's worth saying out loud: photographers from editorial, fashion, and music are gravitating toward wedding work. There's a reason for that. Wedding photography is one of the few corners of the industry that's bulletproof against AI, and the photographers paying attention know it. Instead of pretending it isn't happening, we're welcoming it. The wedding world has plenty to teach a photographer coming in from the outside, and the photographer coming in from the outside has plenty to teach the wedding world back. Wanda is the one we picked to open that conversation in València.

Welcome to the show, Wanda. Vogue editorial, no advertorial.

15/06/2026

We have a soft spot for photographers who work at the top of the industry and never bother announcing it. The ones who don't post much. The ones who let the work do the talking and the word-of-mouth do the rest. Angelika Dupuis Photography, from Zurich, is one of them. She's the next keynote in València.

Try Googling her. There isn't much there. An archive of work that breathes excellence and not much else. Most of the conversation about her work happens between past clients and the couples they recommend her to.

We came across one of those conversations. A couple wrote about meeting Angelika in a Brooklyn brownstone almost two years before their wedding. No Instagram thread. No DM. Two people sitting down together, talking. She runs her practice the way you'd run a friendship.

Look at the work and it explains itself. Documentary plus editorial. A seamless blend of film and digital.

The New Wave most of the industry sees is louder and faster. It's bred photographers who feel like they need to be on all day, Ray-Bans always rolling, vlogging the moment behind the moment behind the moment, the wedding disappearing under three layers of content about the wedding. Angelika is making the case for the other direction. Quiet confidence. Handshakes in brownstones. Some of the best wedding work in Europe with no notoriety machine attached.

Welcome to the show, Angelika. We promise not to ask you to post about it.

14/06/2026

The València rollout continues. Today we switch gears from WUNX to our first keynote of the edition. Christina McNeill, from San Francisco, who has been shooting weddings since 2002.

Twenty-four years in. There aren't many in the industry who can say that, let alone with the consistency Christina has.

The community needs the new voices. We've been saying that. It also needs the long voices. The ones who've been at the work long enough to know what stays and what doesn't. Christina's one of those. The New Wave reads differently when someone with twenty-four years of weddings is reading it.

Last month in Vienna, Reni Maria mentioned Christina on stage when she was listing photographers she admires. The WUN team was already excited. We had plans to invite Christina to keynote València. Reni didn't know that. Christina didn't know it yet either. Reni called her work classic documentary with a cheeky flair. Couples who look the way their friends know them.

Reni also mentioned the solo gallery show. We'll mention it too. In 2024, Christina mounted a solo art exhibition in San Francisco of nothing but her wedding work. Self-funded. First we know of in the genre.

Welcome to the show, Christina. The invitation was always coming.

12/06/2026

Heta Korkonen Photography won Europe's Best Young Wedding Photographer at the WUN Awards in 2023. Then again in 2024. WUN Awards rarely repeats winners. The Young category, scoped to photographers in their first three years of paid wedding work, repeats them even less.

Heta is Finnish, based between Helsinki and Tampere. She's taking WUNX in Valencia. Ten slides, one minute each, six hundred seconds.

Our community is broad. Young and old, elopement and luxury, portrait and bo***ir, every type of working photographer in Europe. And inside that breadth, we have to keep making space for the young voices. If Heta doesn't represent The New Wave, we're not sure who does.

The wins matter. The trajectory underneath them matters more. We've been watching that part for years. She's the one you'll mention in a few years like you're bragging. You saw her in Valencia before she popped.

From her own About page: she wanted to be an actress, then a film director, ended up "having many camera gear conversations with uncs at weddings." Studied communication, not photography. Her phrase for what she's after is "soft chaos."

Welcome to the show, Heta. We called it in 2023.

11/06/2026

WUNX has always been a one-person job. For Valencia we're breaking with that. Six hundred seconds, ten slides, two people running it together.

Christian and Aurora. Husband and wife. Yidaki Studio, based on Lake Como.

The studio is named after an Aboriginal Australian instrument. The Yidaki. A particular kind of didgeridoo, used by Yolngu communities in Arnhem Land. Christian and Aurora spent a month in Australia in 2019, came home in love with the culture, and named their Italian wedding business after a piece of Indigenous Australian sound.

They've been finding their way to WUN the long way around. A Dolomites workshop first. Then an Azores workshop. Then hosting our Supper Club in Milan. That's how community gets built.

Whatever Aurora and Christian do with The New Wave starts from an unusual position. They split every wedding day. Aurora on stills, Christian on video. Two people, one business, working at a level most don't manage solo. Most of the industry is going solo, scaling personal brands one name at a time. Aurora and Christian went the other way. There are couples and partners and friends in this community thinking about the same path. They're already on it.

Welcome to the show, Christian and Aurora. Ask them about Japan.

10/06/2026

In 2010, Sam Ponsford Fotografía left the UK for a fishing village on the Costa da Morte. Literal translation: the Coast of Death. The Galician coastline Romans believed was the end of the world. Sixteen years later, two daughters in, he's about to face a much smaller edge. Ten slides. One minute each. Six hundred seconds. WUNX, on the Teatre Talia stage in Valencia.

Mallorca, 2023. Sam was a guest at a WUN workshop. Nothing about him was trying to be noticed. He sat where he sat, spoke when he spoke, watched more than he talked. By the end of the days the WUN team had landed on a thought we'd never had about a workshop guest: that's a guy we'd want photographing our own wedding. Peculiar feeling about a stranger you're meant to be hosting. But it stuck. If that's how we felt as the hosts, the couples who hire him probably feel it tenfold.

There's a reason it stuck. A WUN line-up only works when the presenters cover different temperaments. Loud and quiet. Luxury and documentary. The names that fill a feed and the ones who barely have one. Different guests come for different reasons. Some specifically for the quieter ones. The very first WUN in 2015 had Ed Peers on stage. Quiet voice, watchful, barely on social, the couples did the loud part for him. That booking taught WUN which presenters those guests come back for. Sam sits in the same lineage.

Most of his work is shot on film. A lot of it on Super 8. Actual Kodak cartridges, loaded and scanned by hand. The current wave in this industry is digital, AI-assisted, accelerating away from analogue. Sam is holding ground on the slowest medium left.

Our bet on Valencia: Sam delivers a message the audience doesn't yet know it needs. He resets the cinema temperature before anyone notices it changed.

Welcome to the show, Sam. Mallorca was a workshop. Turned out we were scouting.

09/06/2026

Ten slides, one minute each, six hundred seconds total, and the clock doesn't wait for you to find your footing. That's WUNX. Way Up North's signature format. Easy on paper. Different in practice.

Next up to walk into that timer is Jakub Cabalka (Puf Creatif - Destination photographer). Prague.

If you've spent time around WUN over the past few years, you know Jakub. If you don't, the giveaway is the moment we mention his name and three people within earshot reach for him before he's finished saying hello. Familjen doesn't shake hands with Jakub. Familjen bearhugs him on sight.

Which means nothing to the photographer on the fence about Valencia reading this. You don't care about an interesting Czech who hugs. Fair. Let's give you something to work with.

German tourists once walked into his Prague studio at 5 Vojtěšská looking for a brothel. Puf, it turns out, is colloquial German for exactly that. Jakub kept the name. Anyone who picks a brand that doubles as a German word for brothel and refuses to change it is telling you something about themselves before you've seen a single frame.

His About page reads the same way. No charm offensive, no origin story, no thirty-paragraph essay about why he loves love. The opening line: "If you hate reading long About texts — we're already getting along. Let's meet or jump on a call instead." Gil from Vienna would approve. Don't waste anyone's time.

The commercial work backs it up. He shoots for some of the most established Czech brands in the country. Names full of vowels you can't pronounce unless you grew up with them. Lasvit if you know crystal. Bzenec if you know wine. Divadlo na zábradlí if you know the theatre where Václav Havel premiered his early plays. Not your golden-light-and-double-rainbows wedding catalogue. Closer to the work most of those photographers wish they were getting hired for.

Whatever The New Wave looks like through Jakub's six hundred seconds is going to sit at a different angle than the rest of the line-up. Welcome to the show, Jakub. The photographers who don't know you yet are about to figure out why the rest of us go in for the hug.

Photo by Inta Lankovska

08/06/2026

WUNX is back in Valencia. Ten slides, one minute each, auto-advancing whether you're ready or not. Six hundred seconds of glory on the clock. Tough, the way it should be.

First brave soul up: Gancea, a Romanian vampire who's been calling Germany home for a while now.

If you were at the Storytelling Evening Vienna in May, you can stop reading. You already know, and we can hear you typing WE TOLD YOU SO at the screen. The cactus moment said everything we needed to know, and that story is hers to tell.

That moment made it obvious. If not WUN, she'd have found her way onto another stage soon enough. Talent, charisma, and chutzpah in that combination don't stay secret long.

What six hundred seconds with Larisa means for those of us in the Valencia cinema is the bigger question: how will she interpret The New Wave?

Well before the Vienna moment, she'd been on our list of potential presenters with a huge circle around her name and one word next to it: UNSTOPPABLE. We see these types wander into the community every few years: a hurricane of talent that ploughs through whatever's between them and where they're going. You can't teach determination like that, and the best we can do is ride alongside and see where the wave breaks next.

Welcome to the show, Larisa. The cactus did its job (twice).

Way Up North

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