Way Up North

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

It took 10 years, but we've finally done it: a horse person is hosting WUN.

The WUN team likes horses. More than most people would expect. Funny how a shared thing outside the work ends up bonding a crew.

Now to Fleur Vanden Bosch.

Earlier this year we ran a Storytelling Evening in Brussels. About a week before, we'd asked everyone coming whether anyone wanted to host. The first reply: "I'm not afraid to talk in front of a lot of people." Fleur. Sold. What's the worst that could happen?

Opposite of the worst happened. Fleur has the "it" factor. Charisma and charm, neither dialled up to suffocating. Day job: wedding photographer in Belgium. Side gig: holding a crowd of strangers like she's known them for years. Hospitality calls it the excellence reflex. The same thing that makes her a serious photographer makes her a serious host.

In Vienna she helped run the back of the show. We won't call it an audition because that's pretentious. We did want to see how she carried herself when nobody was watching. Around our crew. Around the long days that go into three days of WUN.

Then, between blocks one of the Vienna days, she let it drop. She's a horse person. Three of us heard at the same time. Decision made before the next presenter walked on. After the show ended and the cinema was being vacuumed, we asked her about hosting in Valencia.

The host carries more of the stage than any single presenter does. The opening welcome. The transitions. The introductions. The closing line that sends people back into the world. The borderline begging you to be back on time after the breaks. And the unspoken part: when something goes wrong on stage, the host walks on and makes the audience forget anything was wrong. That's the job.

What we love about Fleur: charm without the act, quick wit, and as she put it herself, not afraid to talk in front of a lot of people. Also first to the karaoke mic.

Welcome to the show, Fleur. Sorry if we overdid it with the horse thing.

20:00 CEST tonight. The first name from València lands. €195 becomes €295 at the same moment. Link in first comment.

The WUN community doesn't pull punches. People come back and tell us straight: what worked, what didn't, what's gone soft. That's what family does. A few years ago the message was the same from too many of you. The presentations had started to feel the same. They were stepping back. Respect.

We took it on board and made the call. Stockholm was the ten year anniversary. We let ourselves be sentimental for that one. Booked an entire lineup of past presenters. We'd earned that much. Then we drew a line. No more looking back. No more nostalgia. No more returning presenters. No more obvious names. Forward only.

People who come to WUN come to see what's next. Not what worked last time. Not what worked five years ago. What's next. What the industry is doing this year and where it might be heading. The job is to find them. The people already there. The people we're betting on. Put them on a stage in València.

Get old and die, or find what's next every time we do this. We have no interest in getting nostalgic about how things used to be. Where the community heads next is what we're here to see. We owe that to you.

First name lands tomorrow. €195 turns into €295.

The 20th Way Up North, this October in València.

València tickets: https://wayupnorth.co/product/fall-2026/

Here's how it usually goes with the line-up. Usually, as in: for over ten years.

We start with the core. People we know first-hand. Maybe they came to WUN. Maybe we met them at a workshop. Maybe they won a WUN Award (Danilo & Sharon in 2017 come to mind). Who knows.

After the core is where it gets fun. We ask everyone we trust: who you got? Who's out there we don't know who would be a great presenter? That's how the track record gets built. Names you haven't heard of, who become everywhere.

Dan O'Day raved about Jackson Grant (Florence 2024). Anna Ascari was in love with Lilly Red before she'd presented anywhere (Rome 2022). Amie McNee (Berlin 2023) came from completely outside the wedding world, on a tip from WUN Familjen favourite Nadja Endler. Niki Boon (Rome 2017) was a Si Moore recommendation. Jai Long (Cologne 2018) came from Forged in the North. Jose Villa (Rome 2017) was recommended by... well, everyone.

Other times people just somehow appear in the inbox. Joseph Radhik and John Dolan both DMed us within weeks of each other in 2022. Both showed up at Vienna later that year. That same event Anna Gadalean presented. Again from a recommendation. She was hesitant, and shared something that stuck with us for years afterwards about public speaking: "I'd like to take up that challenge and make 'public speaking' be my friend, not the enemy." Seems she mastered it.

We could keep going. Nearly the entire history of the WUN line-up was pieced together this way. There's no magic formula. It's community. Photographers, planners, videographers, sponsors, friends, the whole creative community around WUN, all passing names of people we should know.

This year's fourteen came together the same way. Some names you'll recognise the second they drop. Some you won't. If our track record means anything, the ones you don't recognise yet are the reason to be in València.

Ten years. Hundreds of presenters. We still wake up with the same feeling: the best is yet to come.

First name lands in 48 hours. €195 turns into €295.

The 20th Way Up North, this October in València.

Fall Tickets: https://wayupnorth.co/product/fall-2026/

The theme for Cologne in 2018 was "Inspiration is for amateurs." We still remember the huge print outside the cinema. Samm Blake's photo from Iceland, the words underneath in caps: INSPIRATION IS FOR AMATEURS. The line-up was incredible. Everyone showed up for it.

Where we fell short as organisers was making sure they knew how much we wanted them to go all-in on the theme. Lesson learned. The theme was a few years ahead of where we were.

Vienna last month was where that Cologne theme finally came alive, even though the Austrian theme on the marquee was The Unsexy Stuff. Eight years late, but it landed. Presenters brought communication strategies, ideas you could use, the practical bits people had been hungry for. Guests told us what they want more of. They want the math. They want the contract language. They want the strategic communication. They want to hear what someone did when they raised their prices and lost a client, and what they did about it. The unphotogenic part.

That's the brief going out to every València presenter. Skip the inspiration. Bring something we can use on October 16th, after they've recovered from the Wooden Banana Party.

The theme this time is The New Wave. Fourteen presenters about to interpret it. Some are new to the game. Some have been at it for twenty-five years. Some shoot stills, some shoot video, some do both. Some have gone all-in on AI, others have made up their minds to ignore it. A dash of Northern Europe, a swing to the south, over to the east, a dusting of the States.

The best part of running WUN is the same reason people come: we want to see what they all do with the same theme. If we weren't running it, we'd be in the audience with everyone else, just as excited to see how it unfolds.

First name lands June 7. €195 until then. €295 after.

The 20th Way Up North, this October in Valencia.

Tickets: https://wayupnorth.co/product/fall-2026/