Sydney and Melvin were married on the first of March, 2025, at Create at Upscale — a photography studio rental on West Cermak. I have worked weddings in banquet halls, gardens, churches and restaurants. This was the first one I shot in a room built for the exact thing I was there to do.

A studio that doesn't look like one

Here is what I expected: white walls, grey floor, gear stacked in the corners, that slightly unfinished feeling every rental studio has when nobody has dressed it.

Here is what it was: a proper room. Upscale, carefully kept, and set up so completely that if you walked in without knowing, you would take it for a banquet hall. The seating, the dinner tables, the decoration — all of it was done, and done well.

But underneath the dressing, the bones were still a studio's bones. Big industrial windows. Exposed brick. Real ceiling height. Open floor.

What that gave us

Two things, and they are worth more than they sound.

The first is backdrops. A studio has them because a studio is for making pictures, and a wedding venue almost never gives you one. We used them.

The second is that we could use our flashes the way we actually want to. In most venues you are fighting a low dark ceiling and three different colours of light that somebody else chose. A room with that much height and that much wall lets you put light where it belongs instead of where the ceiling allows.

It felt like working in our own studio. That is not a sentence either of us gets to say at a wedding.

The ceremony

The ceremony was set at the back of the room, in front of a draped backdrop hung with trailing greenery, with those factory windows behind it.

It started at half past four, and on the first of March in Chicago that means the light is already on its way out. Sydney walked down the aisle into a room where everyone was seated and waiting. The pastor stood at the front, read from scripture, and married them there with the last of the afternoon coming through the glass.

Both of us worked it, one wide and one close. That is how we photograph every wedding, and it is the reason there is a frame of the whole room and a frame of her hands taken in the same second.

The stairwell

Somewhere in the middle of the day we found the stairs.

Old stairs — the kind you only get in a building that used to make something. Open, industrial, worn into shape by decades of use. The feeling in that stairwell was nothing like the room we had just come from, so we took them out and photographed them in it.

If you only ever shoot in the room you were handed, you miss the building it sits in.

The newspaper

The thing I still think about is the newspaper.

They had made one. A full front page, laid out as the programme for the day — what was happening and when — with their own photograph running across it, typeset like the front of a Chicago daily.

It was beautifully done. I have photographed a lot of wedding stationery and most of it is a card with a time printed on it. This was somebody's idea, carried all the way through, and it photographed as well as it read.

The details

A room like that is generous with detail work, so we took our time over it. The wedding bands. The Bible. Their shoes. Set up deliberately and lit the way we would light them at home, because for once we could.

And then a party

Dinner was in the same room, and when dinner was over the music started and everybody danced.

That is a day which does not move around much — one building, one room, one evening. I would take it every time. Nobody spent an hour of their wedding in a car. Nothing had to be cut short to make a drive time. All anyone had to do that day was be there.