Why I Photograph Weddings

Lee is not my real name.

I was born in the Philippines as Sean Urbano Ilaida — the seventh child of a family in Cebu who wanted something better for me than they could provide. A few months after I was born, I arrived in Switzerland. A family from the Aargau adopted me, gave me a home, gave me two sisters, and gave me the name Lee.

This is where I grew up. This is where I became who I am. And for a long time, the story of Sean felt like something that had happened to someone else — present in the background, but not urgent. My parents were my parents. The Aargau was home. I thought like a Swiss person. My wife tells me I am a proper Swiss Bünzli.

Then, at twenty-five, something became louder.

The Questions I Had Carried

A long relationship ended. I fell into a hole. And in that hole, questions I had carried for years without fully acknowledging them came forward. Who was I before I became Lee? Where did I come from? Why had my birth parents let me go?

Around the same time, my Philippine nieces and nephews found me on Facebook.

I quit my job. I flew to Cebu for six weeks.

I remember the moment the lift doors opened in a shopping mall. I knew immediately — before anyone spoke, before anything was explained — that the people standing there were my parents. They were trembling. They held me. I barely moved. I was frozen in something that felt like shock but was not quite shock. More like the world rearranging itself quietly around me.

By the second day, I felt at home.

Two Families

What followed was not simple. I came back to Switzerland and fell apart in a different way. I considered emigrating. I needed support. I felt pulled in two directions at once — as if having two families meant belonging fully to neither.

It took time. Psychological support. Honest conversations with my parents in the Aargau, who had always known this day would come and who never stopped me from going.

But on the other side of that time was something I had not expected: clarity.

In the spring of 2015, my Swiss family flew to the Philippines with me. My parents met my parents. Both families stood in the same room, in the same photographs. A circle that had been open for twenty-five years quietly closed.

I have the Philippine islands tattooed on my forearm. The flag with the sun and three stars on my upper arm. My home is the Aargau. My roots are in Cebu. Both are true at the same time.

What This Has to Do With a Camera

In February 2016, I photographed my first wedding. The couple were people I knew. So were the next nine couples after that. For almost two years, I photographed only people from my own life — friends, acquaintances, people who trusted me because they already knew me. I was not yet certain I deserved the trust of strangers.

Then, at the end of 2017, I flew to Florence for a wedding. Sixteen hours of photography. A full day, beginning to end, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with a couple I had never met before.

Something shifted that day. Not in a single image or a single moment — but in the accumulation of it all. The preparation in the morning. The ceremony. The first dance. The late hours when the formality drops and people are simply, completely themselves. Sixteen hours of being present for something that would never happen again.

I came home and built my first website. I offered my work to couples I did not know. I was ready.

But I have thought since then about why that day in Florence felt like the confirmation I had been waiting for. And I think it comes back to Cebu.

When those lift doors opened, I was standing in front of a moment that had been twenty-five years in the making. A moment that — had anything been different, any small decision, any other choice — would simply not have existed. My Swiss parents choosing me. My birth parents choosing to give me a life they could not provide. A Facebook message from a niece I had never met.

Everything that brought me to that lift was unrepeatable.

Every wedding is unrepeatable.

The first dance happens once. The look between a father and his daughter at the ceremony door — that specific look, on that specific day, with that specific light — happens once. The moment a couple steps outside and laughs because the rain has finally stopped: once. And then it is over, and all that remains is what was captured.

I have been given more than most people are given. Two families. Two countries. A wife, Anna Maria, who has been beside me since 2013. Two children — Emilia Sofia and Lio Luis — whose faces remind me every morning of how much there is to be grateful for.

Knowing how much I have been given created something in me. A hunger. A responsibility. A need to honour it all by showing up fully — in my family, in my work, in every room I walk into with a camera.

This is my why.

Not a strategy. Not a brand story. Just the truth of where I come from and what it taught me about the value of a single, unrepeatable moment.

When you invite me to your wedding day, you are inviting someone who understands — at a level that goes beyond craft or technique — what it means to hold something that cannot be held again.

I do not take that lightly. I never have.