Two days. Two cultures. One love story writtenTwo days. Two cultures. One love story written across both.
Tehana & Manny
When Tehana and Manny first told us about their wedding, they didn't describe one day, they described two. Two ceremonies. Two sets of traditions, carried across two continents and two cultures, woven together across a November weekend in Perth. From the sacred halls of Gurdwara Sahib Bennett Springs to the open river setting of Nedlands Yacht Club, this was a wedding that asked you to hold two worlds at once and showed you, beautifully, how well they fit together.
DAY 01
The seventh of November began early, and it began with family. On the bride's side, Tehana's morning was everything these mornings are laughter, nerves, love dressed up as busyness. Mothers and sisters and bridesmaids filling a room with something that doesn't have a name but every photographer recognises the moment they see it. We spent time with Tehana and her family, capturing the quiet moments between the getting ready rush her mother adjusting something, a bridesmaid catching her eye in the mirror, her father standing in the doorway.
Then across to Manny the groom with his best man and family around him, the energy different but the emotion the same. Pride. Anticipation. The particular stillness of a man about to be married.
At Gurdwara Sahib Bennett Springs, the Anand Karaj unfolded the way it always does with weight, with grace, and with the quiet authority of a ceremony that has meant the same thing for centuries. The rituals moved through the Gurdwara in the way that only the Sikh wedding tradition can communal and sacred at once, the congregation present not just as witnesses but as participants. Manny's Punjabi heritage filled every corner of that space. And for those in the room who were experiencing it for the first time including many who had travelled from New Zealand to be there you could see it landing. Something understood without needing translation.
After the Anand Karaj, we moved to Mulberry on Swan for the bridal party shoot the Swan River glittering behind them, the wedding party still riding the high of the morning. It was a generous gift from the Mulberry team, and the images we captured there carry that light. The first day closed quietly. The second was still coming.
DAY 02
The eighth of November. The bridal party gathered at the Pan Pacific Hotel a different energy now, looser and warmer, the nerves of the first ceremony replaced by something more like joy. Tehana's bridesmaids were electric. The groomsmen brought the same. By the time we arrived at Nedlands Yacht Club for the Western ceremony, everyone was ready. The ceremony was held outdoors, right on the river, Perth at its most quietly spectacular. Vows exchanged in the open air, the Swan behind them, the afternoon light doing what Perth afternoon light does in November.
Afterwards, the wedding party climbed into vintage Silver Lady cars and we made our way to the University of Western Australia. Wide sandstone arches. Cloisters that seemed built for photographs. Tehana and Manny in the middle of it all, and all around them the people who had flown across the Tasman, driven across the city, to be exactly here.
The reception at Nedlands Yacht Club that evening was, in the best possible sense, a celebration. The entry was a blast of energy. The Indian DJ — Nachra Roadshow — brought a sound that owed as much to Punjabi celebration as it did to anything else, and the crowd responded in kind. People danced. Properly danced. Speeches came from Tehana's father and Manny's mother and the friends who had known them long enough to tell the real stories. The food was Indian, rich and generous and exactly right. And the room held something you rarely get to witness: two communities, one from the Māori and New Zealand traditions that shaped Tehana, one from the Sikh Punjabi culture that shaped Manny, moving together on the same dance floor, completely at home.
Two cultures came to celebrate the same two people. By the end of the night, you couldn't tell where one ended and theother began
Tehana and Manny — two days with you was an absolute privilege. The beauty of what you built wasn't just in the venues or the styling or the food, though all of it was exceptional. It was in watching two families, from opposite ends of the world and opposite ends of culture, choose each other as readily as you chose each other. We had so much fun. We'll remember it for a long time.
— Sukh Verka and the S2V Studio team · Your Story, Our Passion
