BONJOUR, I’m

Sébastien

I grew up in Paris and spent a decade in California. Those two places see differently, and I carry both.

The French eye is slower. It notices architecture before people, reads a room before entering it, and tends toward restraint. The Californian one is more immediate: warmer, less formal, more comfortable with joy as a subject. Working between the two means I can hold the elegance of a château in Burgundy and the loose energy of a San Francisco city hall on the same day, and find something true in both.

Terrence Malick described his approach as following grace wherever it goes. That is the closest description I have found for what I am doing on a wedding day. I walk into a venue and read it first: where the light is falling, what the architecture is asking for, which corners will matter later. Then I wait. Not passively. I am always moving, always reading the room. But I am waiting for the moment when what someone feels crosses the surface of their face, and I am there when it does.

The couples whose photographs go furthest are the ones living their day rather than managing it. Not relaxed necessarily. Present. Feeling it. When that is happening, the camera becomes irrelevant, and that is when the real photographs exist.

I have been doing this for over ten years, across Europe, the United States, and beyond. Destination weekends, elopements, city ceremonies, multi-day celebrations in places where the venue itself is a collaborator. My work sits between editorial and documentary: considered framing, honest light, and expression that was never asked for.

My editing follows the same logic. Restrained, natural, nothing borrowed from the season. The photographs should look like your wedding, not like the year they were taken.