Meet The Cameraman Who Travels The World Photographing Weddings For Free

May 30, 2024

I’m as much of a fan of love and rom-coms as the next person. But unlike Vincent Po, I haven’t managed to channel my passion for it into a passion project. I’m far from getting married, but when I stumbled upon an article about Po’s wedding photography in The New York Times, I knew I had to speak to this guy – and not because I’m planning a wedding myself anytime soon.

For the uninitiated, Po is the photographer behind the lens of the Portrait of a Young Couple project, which has allowed him to photograph hundreds of weddings and counting so far, in over x countries around the world. A side hustle born more out of circumstance rather than necessity, I consider Po’s path to this project a combination of both natural talent and fate. Po’s entryway to photography, and the idea behind Portrait of a Young Couple, was born out of somewhat of an identity crisis, as he pondered his options after entering Princeton University. (Anyone who has ever dreamed of breaking the mould and doing their own thing can probably relate.) Whereas the journey may not have been smooth sailing to say the least, it has proven infinitely more rewarding in the most unpredictable of ways, taking him away from a steady, surefire career in engineering into the most emotional, intimate moments of everyday people’s lives. It’s the kind of tradeoff not made for everyone, but a dream come true for those searching for deeper meanings and more fulfilling conversations in life.

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The premise is simple, but the results are anything but. Share your love story, fly him out to your wedding, and pay for his room and board – then he’ll capture the festivities on camera free of charge. And while you may be wondering how Po makes a living out of it all, what he gets in return out of his endeavours is more than what anybody’s standard salary can afford. Just take a look at some of the storylines on the Portrait blog, and you’ll see what I mean: Two queer people raise their son with a tireless conviction sculpted by trauma, conflict, and comedy. After battling alcoholism and addiction for 20 years, Ty and Lindsey reflect upon the wedding day they never believed could happen. These are more than just transactional business opportunities for Po; these are sabbaticals of sorts, experiences which have deepened his understanding of the world more than any college education could ever do. And while greater popularity has come with greater demands on his time and energy, Po feels more prepared than ever for the challenge ahead in this next phase of his project, with an expanded outlook on life and more stories than ever to his name. Ahead, learn more about Portrait of a Young Couple, how to convert your long-term passion project into a full-fledged career, and whether you want to take a chance at sharing your story with the world through Po’s trusted camera lens.

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I grew up with lots of love—from my parents and from my friends—but like anyone else, I only experienced that love from the fixed view of my own surroundings. I learned that love was something that you give generously but quietly and receive with gratitude but without expectation. It was heavy on service but light on words or touch. My parents and friends protected me and gave me their time and energy; we also rarely said I love you to each other or embraced.

I was 20 when I photographed my first wedding. I’d always loved photography not for the aesthetics but for its ability to create reason to spend time with other people. For me, there is no more meaningful way to spend time with someone than by photographing their wedding.

Love brings out all of human nature: its best, its worst, its proudest, its most embarrassed, its most mournful and its most joyful. Documenting it is a way for me to learn from people with vastly different experiences than my own; to see how they love and live differently, and to highlight the beauty in all those differences.

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My wedding photos will tell you that the coolest places I’ve been to are those in bright, beautiful venues or amid vast and astonishing landscapes. But I also can’t help but think of places that contrast the most with the “perfect image” of a wedding.

My favorite example of this is the home of a couple named Kevin and Pam. Their wedding was held in upstate New York, where Pam grew up and where much of her family still lives, but the couple live in rural Alaska on a nine acre plot of undeveloped land they purchased in mid-2021.

Just a week before their wedding, you’d have found Kevin and Pam covered in dirt and hacking away at trees and roots to clear an area for an electrical drop; laying subfloor and insulation in the shipping container they will one day call home; eating under a tarp, cooking with a knife on a camping stove with a box of food they got from their local food bank. And this, more than their wedding in upstate New York, showed their love’s present and future: uncomfortable, muddy, manic, in service of a future that is optimistic, triumphant, and independent.

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I’ve seen a lot! Tea ceremonies, horahs, full-moon rituals, animal sacrifices. The ones that I remember most clearly are those filled with intention.

One such example was a tea ceremony that a couple named My and La Lee performed back in 2020. The opening to their story reads, “My (pronounced “me”) and La Lee’s tea ceremony, a Vietnamese wedding tradition that included the gifting of golden jewelry, expensive liquor, and a whole roasted pig, and which was one of three wedding ceremonies they planned, had no tea.”

The ceremony was frenzied. La Lee’s family (who are Hmong) couldn’t understand the Vietnamese My’s family often spoke (or shouted), while My’s family often didn’t know what to do either; it’d been decades since they performed a tea ceremony, after immigrating to the US in the early 2000’s. There were many moments of awkward silence or sudden hurry, and everyone was so caught up in gift-giving, thanking others, or honoring ancestors that they completely forgot about the ceremony’s namesake tea.

Despite its chaos, the ceremony was remarkably sincere. Its meaning didn’t come from performing it perfectly, but trying to perform it at all. It was a metaphor for the family’s broader immigrant story. As I wrote, “The American immigrant experience is one of struggle and one of pride: struggle to learn the culture in the new land, pride in retaining that from the land left behind.”

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Perhaps it’s ironic that, for all the time I spend documenting other people’s love, I’ve never been in it myself. But what I’ve yet to learn from the depth of personal experience, I’ve gained in the breadth of learning from so many others.

Every couple has taught me something new about what is possible, both about love but also how it intersects with every other part of life: family, children, work, hobbies, fears, dreams. Age gaps, inter-cultural relationships, financial insecurity, trauma, unexpected pregnancies; the list goes on of stories I’ve lived among and documented. Each reminds me that love is a choice you make and which everyone makes differently.

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Avoid pinning your sense of fulfillment to the scale of your success: how many followers you have, how much work you sell, how many gigs you book. These are all important to a long, successful career, but they do not make that career, nor will they be consistent across it. In your lows (and there will be lows) something more intentional must ground you.

Celebrate the big public wins, yes. Recognition is exhilarating. But what motivates you daily must come from a more private place. No one will, can, or should ever be as invested or interested in your work as yourself. Ground yourself in your creation process, not the end product or how others view it.

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