Danny Ghitis: The Best Day Ever!

One thing all cultures have in common is the official joining of its people in marriage. Symbols are used to represent love and devotion to God or State. The decorum may be joyous or somber, with colorful dances or solemn prayers. Whether a wedding is a strategic move by royalty, an easy road to citizenship, or a couple joining their souls before God, each is a product of its environment.

As far as our country is concerned, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead breaks it down in her book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

“…Weddings provide an unparalleled lens upon the intimate sphere of American life, and that the way we marry reveals a great deal about prevailing cultural expectations of love, hopes for marriage, and sense of the role of family…Weddings are social events, as distinct from the private and always mysterious marriages which they inaugurate; and that they give expression, one way or another, to the values and preoccupations of the society in which they take place….We want weddings to be meaningful. But what, these days, do we make them mean?”

It is no coincidence that the phrase “to give expression” was also used by the Magnum Photos co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson in the context of documentary photography. The microcosm of my visual experience shooting weddings in NJ represents some larger elements of society, though not all of it. You only receive the information I present, not a greater context.  Some inferences can be drawn about the culture of the region that led to the possibility of the photograph.

In the state of New Jersey, a melting-pot of customs collide with unstoppable consumerism to give expression through a unique wedding culture. A sense of longing for the decadence of New York City sometimes shows, but contrasts strongly with the state’s suburban context. And despite the variety of religions and cultures in the state, most weddings I attended were practically indistinguishable from one another. The wedding industry has become the tradition people follow of as they decide how to present their betrothal to their community.

Millions of dollars in marketing campaigns make people expect their wedding pictures to look a certain way (with some exceptions). They also expect the pictures to capture- what they have been convinced is the most important day of their life. It is the photographer’s supposed duty to recreate the “story” of the day so a couple can relive their smorgasbord once every 5 years or so. As Mead puts it, “…another function of the wedding album: as a means of capturing images of the material production upon which so much thought, time, an money have been expended.”

However, photography has its limitations. This is more a reflection on myself than anything else. It’s about my own discomfort in contributing to what I feel exaggerated consumerism has done to a ritual that is beautiful in nature.