There is a photograph on Yervant Zanazanian’s own website of a wedding party throwing confetti outside a set of cathedral doors, and it looks like chaos with good lighting, which is more or less the studio’s whole philosophy in one frame. Nobody arranged where the petals would land. What was arranged, across three generations of the same family, was knowing exactly when to be standing there with a camera already raised.
Zanazanian was eleven years old when he won his first photography award, an image of an African landscape, taken with a camera he was not, strictly, supposed to be using. His father Hagop was the photographer summoned by the palace of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie for official assignments, and Yervant would tag along, unnoticed, photographing the candid moments his father’s formal brief did not cover. The medal was presented at a private audience with the Emperor himself.
That is an unusual origin story for a Melbourne wedding photographer, and it explains something about the studio’s insistence on capturing what nobody has scheduled. Zanazanian later became an early adopter of digital capture and post-production, at a point when much of the wedding industry was still shooting film, and is widely credited with developing the magazine-style wedding album now standard across the industry. WPPI, the organisation behind the wedding and portrait photography world’s best known annual convention and awards, gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
The studio’s own material describes him since as “The Most Influential Wedding Photographer of Our Time,” a title that could easily be dismissed as marketing copy if it only appeared on his own site. It does not. Cosmos Awards, an independent photography awards platform, repeats the same description and the same 2010 WPPI date on its own judge listing, and Zanazanian’s name sits alongside Arnold Newman, Monte Zucker and Joe Bussink on third-party lists of the award’s past recipients, names any working wedding photographer would recognise.
None of that history shows up directly in the pictures, but the instinct behind it does. The two black and white frames through the car window, taken seconds apart, are the kind of image a photographer only gets by refusing to ask anyone to hold still. The bride is mid-laugh in one and mid-kiss in the other, and in both the glass and the dark interior do as much of the composing as the moment itself.
This is also, still, a family business, which is not incidental to how it operates. Yervant is Creative Director; his wife Anie runs the client side of the studio and, by the account of couples who leave reviews, treats them like family well before the invoices arrive. Their sons Robbie and Ricky both shoot, splitting photography and videography between them. Ricky brought an information technology degree from Monash University into a business that otherwise still hand-picks every second shooter rather than subcontracting one.
The studio is based in South Melbourne now, at a studio on Gladstone Street, worth stating plainly because some older directory listings still carry a previous Docklands address. Google’s own listing, at 4.8 stars from more than ninety reviews, and the studio’s current site agree on South Melbourne, the more reliable pairing of sources, and it is where the team is actually based today rather than where it was once registered.
One policy is stated more firmly than almost anything else on the studio’s own FAQ page: there is no hourly rate. Coverage begins at the groom’s residence, documenting preparation before anyone else has arrived, and continues without a fixed cut-off through the ceremony, the family photographs and into the reception. The studio’s own reasoning is that limiting the hours means losing the parts of the day that happen in between the scheduled ones.
Only the wedding rings and the photography and video last a lifetime. Everything else is over by midnight.
On Yervant International Photography
It follows that the studio does not cap the number of photographs taken either. Its packages promise more than a thousand edited, high-resolution images per wedding, delivered through an online gallery typically ready within about ten days, though the studio is upfront that the timeline can move depending on the season and how many weddings are already queued.
There is a distinction worth knowing before comparing quotes across photographers: “editing,” in this studio’s vocabulary, means culling the full shoot and correcting colour across the set you receive, not retouching each frame individually. Retouching, meaning blemish removal, skin toning and the studio’s own black and white conversion process, is reserved for images chosen for albums, prints and wall art, made in Italy by hand rather than printed locally.
The getting-ready pictures carry a particular Melbourne texture that would be hard to fake: a hotel room with the curtains open onto the city, a portico with lace sleeves catching the light, an arcade strung with lights after dark. None are staged so much as noticed, which is the throughline across a portfolio that spans a bank foyer, a cathedral porch and a laneway with equal comfort.
The studio’s FAQ is also candid about what it does not do quickly: wedding films can take four to six months to finish, because they are edited in-house rather than outsourced, with two separate cuts delivered eventually, a highlight reel of around twelve minutes and a full-day edit that can run to two hours. Not a photography detail, strictly, but it says something about a studio that would rather take longer than send the work elsewhere.
The studio also states plainly that it will “honour all traditions and cultures,” a line that matters more in a city like Melbourne than it might elsewhere. Multicultural and multi-faith weddings are common enough across the portfolio, and a family business built by an Armenian photographer born in Ethiopia and trained in Venice is, perhaps unsurprisingly, comfortable with a wedding day that does not follow a single template.
The social media side of the business is not an afterthought either. Packages include custom-designed clips for a couple’s own social channels, delivered within 24 hours of the wedding, and the studio’s own Instagram account, run under the same “Fashion Meets Wedding” banner, has built an audience of close to 55,000 followers, largely other couples and photographers rather than paid reach. For a photography business, that is closer to a second portfolio than a marketing line item.
A Portfolio That Doesn’t Sit Still
Look for long enough and the portfolio resists being filed under one look. There are hard-lit black and white street frames next to soft, window-lit bridal portraits; a bride photographed like a fashion editorial beside one photographed candidly, unaware, through a compact mirror. That range is the point of “Fashion Meets Wedding,” the phrase Zanazanian is credited with coining: not a single filter applied to every wedding, but a fashion photographer’s eye applied to whatever the day actually gives him.
The two mirror images make the point well. One is a considered, symmetrical shot of a bride from behind at a dressing mirror, lit like a magazine spread. The other is unposed entirely: a compact mirror caught mid-application, the bride’s face reflected small and slightly off-centre. Both are clearly the same photographer’s eye, applied to two completely different kinds of moment.
Reviews on Google, currently sitting at 4.8 from more than ninety of them, tend to mention the same thing regardless of who wrote them: that the day never felt directed. One couple, married in September 2025, wrote that the team made them feel at ease from the first meeting and that the results “exceeded all our expectations,” with the studio’s own reply thanking them by name within the following months, an attentive habit for a business with this many weddings behind it.
None of this comes with a published price. The studio’s own packages page offers an “Investment Guide” and a free initial consultation rather than a rate card, standard practice at this level of the market but still worth knowing before you enquire: budget for a conversation before you budget for a number. What is published, in detail, is everything the day itself involves, down to the distinction between editing and retouching, which is more transparency than most studios volunteer unprompted.
What a couple is actually buying, in the end, is closer to an editorial commission than a standard photography package: full-day access, unlimited frames, a family team that has been doing this across two continents and three generations, and a finished object, the Italian-made album, that is built to outlast the digital files it is drawn from. The eleven-year-old with his father’s spare camera in Addis Ababa would likely recognise the instinct, even if none of the rest of it.
Questions
Is there an hourly rate?
No. Coverage runs from the groom’s preparations through the reception without a fixed hourly cut-off.
How many photos will we receive?
The studio does not cap the shot count. Packages promise 1000+ edited, high-resolution images, delivered via an online gallery usually within about 10 days.
Where is the studio based?
South Melbourne, at a studio on Gladstone Street. Some older directory listings still show a previous Docklands address.
Is the WPPI award genuine?
Yes. Yervant Zanazanian received the WPPI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010; the “Most Influential Wedding Photographer of Our Time” title originates with the studio but is independently repeated by third-party sources including Cosmos Awards.
Do they also film weddings?
Yes, though this listing covers the photography. Wedding films are edited in-house and can take four to six months, delivered as a highlight reel and a longer full-day edit.
Yervant International Photography
- Photography: Yervant International Photography
- Based: South Melbourne, Australia
- Website: yervantphotography.com
