The Wedding Dress: A Series

Together, love and marriage is a universal theme that defines societies globally. For one day in her life the bride, with her groom, is the center of attention. Photography records the visual events later to be arranged in a keepsake wedding album. The spectacle of desire is a validation, the legal and social knot is tied holding out the promise of a happy future. What remains unrecorded are the subtle emotional and psychological shifts in identity for the individual female who on that same day journeys from an “I” to a more public, external “we” that over time may more than likely subsume her.

The centerpiece of my project, The Wedding Dress: A Series, visually retraces and re-examines the roots of this life event through my own personal story. The wedding dress, highlighted as symbol and sign of that special day in my life concurrently signals yet another change in my identity in the present. I wear it in order to be photographed in it, perhaps for the last time. The images are intentionally hung in a series to reference the figure locomotion studies of the American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830 – 1904). Each self-portrait is hung side-by-side in a linear continuum representing each year of my marriage.

These grouped images are a visual diary of a necessary cathartic ritual symbolizing love and loss, joy and sorrow, from the mundane to the meaningful and they end with a formal and public “letting go” of my former identity as wife. The concluding image is one of a dramatic, silhouetted outline, merging with the ghostly shadow of a figure wearing a wedding dress and standing in for my hidden, former self. The repetitive digital photographs in muted tones capture a variety of gestural forms suggesting a clash and a metamorphosis of feelings.

I revisit the innocence of many girlhood memories of playing “dress up” — an unconscious ritual of role-playing and gender coding. My use of fabric, as something that simultaneously conceals, binds and reveals, pays homage to my mother, now gone, and her love of all things textile. The use of burlap suggests the raw and youthful innocence of a young love and the emotional abrasiveness at the end of a marriage. As the figure moves through the space behind the curtain, the dress, with her identity, is finally shed like a skin.