After learning to embrace her own heritage, Petronella Lugemwa decided to help other people celebrate theirs.

Petronella Lugemwa is an expert at hiding in plain sight. Growing up as a first-generation Ugandan immigrant in Alabama, she learned to cover up the aspects of her cultural, personal, and racial identity that made her different from her neighbors. She abandoned her last name, donned a Southern accent, and wore Birkenstocks. She wanted to appear like just, “another Southern black girl.” Unfortunately, she couldn’t escape the pain of being different by disguising herself.

Her classmates asked if her family arrived in the US by swimming across the Atlantic and if all of Africa was as poor and starved as the images on TV.

“When you immigrate to this country, assimilation is one of those unspoken things that happens,” Petronella says, “It makes me cry every time that I think about what it means for someone to have to suppress a part of themselves.”

At the beginning of her wedding photography career, Petronella struggled to distinguish her business from others. The years she had spent feeling uncomfortable about being different were now preventing her from creating a unique brand for her photography business. When a friend at a photography workshop told her that she was concealing her identity, she experienced a turning point in her life.

“I spent all this time crafting an identity that revolved around disguising who I really was, that I had such a visceral reaction to someone seeing me for who I really am for the first time.”

She decided to embrace the features of her Ugandan-American culture that others might find weird—the food, language, traditions, and her closeness with her family. Now, she would use her own story to help other people celebrate their own cultural heritage.

When Petronella meets with a couple who are interested in working with her, she shares her life story and creates a space where they can also share their story. “Each story is unique,” she says, “and at the same time, there’s an instant recognition.”

Petronella has found that is doesn’t matter whether they are El Salvadoran, Trini, Indian or Chinese. They’ve usually encountered the same struggles, from feeling pressure to assimilate to encountering language barriers. But they also share a similar desire. They want to incorporate their culture’s cuisine and traditions into their wedding, a day of celebrating who they are. Petronella uses this opportunity to learn as much as she can about the couple so that she can capture the elements of their wedding day that make them uniquely beautiful.

She has explained to wedding venues that Nigerian families need extra time to photograph their extended families. She’s told wedding planners that the most important part of a Ugandan wedding isn’t the vows – it’s the kwanjula, or traditional ceremony of giving-away-of-the-bride. She knows how to capture the sensuality of the kompa dance at a Haitian wedding.

Being able to honor the wishes and cultural identities of her clients is important to Petronella because she is ensuring that these moments are documented in the future. By the time they get to her, some clients have spoken to multiple photographers who’ve refused to work with them.

She met with a Colombian-American man who wanted a photographer to document his proposal to his Mexican-American girlfriend in the presence of their families. But photographer after photographer told him that proposals was supposed to be intimate and that having family members around would be so distracting that it would prevent them from getting the best photos. They told him that that’s just not how engagement shoots were done. Petronella didn’t express the same reservations. Of course your family will be there, she said.

In the past, Petronella was an expert at camouflaging herself. Now she’s an expert at identifying other people who are in hiding. “I want people to be who they are in a loud and proud way. People don’t always have that opportunity,” Lugemwa says. “That’s why I do what I do.”

Sponsored by Fujifilm