by Sandra Michelle Dans (University of the Philippines, Diliman)
Fig. 1. Wedding Day. Image from Sandra Dans
My parents only have one photograph of themselves on their wedding day.
Or rather, they only have one photograph of just the two of them. Actually, I’d argue that the photograph is barely that: it’s the two of them next to each other, yes, but it’s been cropped from a larger group photo. The story they tell is that they were unable to hire a dedicated wedding photographer, so my grandfather invited a friend who was a news photographer to take photographs instead. As a result, all the photos that they have from their wedding are either straight documentation of the wedding ritual or group photographs from the reception. Their friend simply photographed what he saw, and resulting in basically a “news coverage” of their wedding (to be clear, my parents find this hilarious).
Even though my parents married in the 1980s, this story illustrates peculiarities of wedding photography that are still present today. For a wedding photographer to be successful, it is simply not enough for them to know how to document the event as it is (though you will need to know that as well). The photographer has to be familiar with the expectations placed on wedding photography by the clients, by the wedding industry, and even by society as a whole.
At the outset, it might seem like the primary function of wedding photographs is personal: memory-keeping, private documentation, making images to mark a personal milestone. After all, this is what a lot of vernacular and family photography are for; they are kept in private albums, only shown to trusted friends or other family members. This activity has, of course, expanded and become more complicated in the age of social media, but generally speaking, the primary intended audience of family photographs is the family.
Because of the content of wedding photography, it might be easy to mistake these images as having the same intention. However, wedding photographs have more complicated functions that inform both their construction, and how they are used by the couples who are pictured.
Unlike private family photography, wedding photographs rarely exist for the sole function of being viewed by the photographed persons and those to whom they choose to give access. They are almost always social, outward-facing documents, a function that has been turbo-boosted by social media. Both engagement photographs (from what are called “pre-nup” photoshoots in the Philippines) and wedding photographs are typically used by the couple and their families to actively signal to their social milieu that there is an imminent shift in social dynamics.
It is therefore crucial for wedding photographs to be readable as wedding photographs in order to perform this function. It is simply not enough for a wedding photograph to be internally meaningful to the couple or their family. If this is all that it achieves, the photograph is not typically considered “usable” as a social signal - it will not be shared on social media to announce the union, or shared in a groupchat by a mother to her amigas, or used to represent the event as a print in the family home. Certain visual cues must be in place for this function to be achieved, and these will be discussed below.
The social function of wedding photographs is inherited from the nature of weddings themselves, which are personal commitments made public through ceremony and bureaucracy. In the Philippines, a wedding that is not announced upon engagement, or one that is made public only after the fact, is referred to as tanan, or an elopement, which is traditionally associated with familial rejection, rebellion, and often shame. Wedding photographs are one of the most straightforward ways to proclaim that a union is accepted, joyful for the families involved, and above all, moral.
Arguably, this function applies even to weddings of couples who do not conform to traditional Filipino expectations such as LGBTQ couples or those of divorced / separated individuals. Creating and circulating wedding photographs can be a way to publicly claim their partners and legitimize their relationships with the same aplomb that “normative” couples do.
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What does it mean for a wedding photograph to be readable? A photograph of a couple at a hotel will elicit a significantly different response from their peers than a photograph of the same couple getting married, even if it’s at the same hotel. The difference here is the presence of what I would call wedding signifiers, visual cues signifying that a wedding has taken place to a wide audience. The exact wedding signifiers may vary from place to place, culture to culture, and even from time to time, but their function is the same whenever they appear.
One of the earliest known wedding photographs is of English nobility. Seen below is a wedding photograph of Queen Victoria and King Albert. Though the couple wedded in 1840, the photograph is dated 1854, a good 14 years after the actual wedding ceremony transpired. (Interestingly, they were photographed by one of the first European war photographers, Roger Fenton. In that sense, they also had a newsman covering their wedding!)
Fig. 2. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert - 11 May 1854. Photograph by Roger Fenton (1819-69). Image from Royal Collection Trust: https://www.rct.uk/collection/2906513/queen-victoria-and-prince-albert
Despite the lapse of 14 years, certain elements were purposely made visible in order to signal that this photograph was unmistakably a(n English) wedding photograph. The elements include the white dress, the lace veil, the formal attire, the floral motif, the couple facing each other photographed in profile. Even at the onset of the practice of wedding photography, readability was a primary concern. Most if not all of these elements are still used as wedding signifiers in wedding imaging today.
In Philippine wedding photography, the most common and easily readable signifier is the attire: a white dress for women, a formal suit or barong for men. Sometimes there is a veil; often there are flowers. Engagement and/or wedding rings are also common. Even at “mass weddings”, which are solemnizing events held by local governments across the country, lower income families who cannot afford to hold a traditional wedding event will choose to spend what little money they have on signifiers that most readily communicate the nature of the event: the white dress for women, the formal suit for men.
Fig. 3. “IN PHOTOS: Mayors officiate mass weddings across the Philippines”, Feb 2023. Photo from Rappler, Uncredited. https://www.rappler.com/nation/photos-local-government-units-officiate-mass-wedding-philippines-february-2023/
Certain signifiers are photographic in nature too - a woman in white dress entering the church, or much like Albert and Victoria in the photograph above, a couple facing each other in front of an altar or a third person (usually a religious leader, sometimes a civil servant). There are many others, but generally speaking, these signifiers are present in many, if not all, of the photographs that wedding photographers deliver to their clients, especially in the greater Manila area where a lot of visual trends in Philippine wedding photography tend to emanate. Whether in high- or low-income demographics, the signifiers tend to remain similar.
With regards to the origins of these signifiers, it’s hard to ignore their gendered and colonial provenances. Many ceremonial practices in the Philippines have been inherited and syncretized from our colonizers. Therefore, their corresponding signifiers tend to resemble those of American or Spanish-era practices. Others have originated locally, such as the practice of the money dance during the reception, the candle and cord rituals in Catholic ceremonies, and the presence of elder “principal sponsors” (ninongs and ninangs). The Philippine photography industry and the wedding photography industry in particular have been deeply classed and gendered until very recently. Despite weddings being coded as a feminine event, or one that primarily concerns women (an observation that might require a whole other essay to unpack), the purveyors of wedding imagery have predominantly been men. This has led to some unexamined conventions in the practice that may have unsavory implications. For example, grooms are usually framed in images as relaxed and affluent - their formal wear is often presented as new and expensive. Their preparations usually take mere minutes (compared to the bride who takes hours) and conventional direction for men is to appear celebratory or nonchalant. The groom is coded as wealthy. Brides, on the other hand, are framed as virtuous and virginal ingenues - the conventional direction is for them to appear anticipatory and giddy when presented to her would-be husband as a gift from the last man who had authority over her (her father). The bride is coded as pure.
These conventions persist in a mostly uncontested state. Wedding photographers I have interviewed, most of them women, find no issue in what to me are contentious signifiers; nor do they find much merit in my interpretations. Couples I have spoken to are usually happy to take the advice of their wedding suppliers (a term which refers to any contractor hired to work on their event, from coordinators to photographers) on what their wedding signifiers should be, presumably because they are typically more interested in planning a readable event that satisfies their families and the status quo than they are in reinventing these signifiers. And so the wedding signifiers cycle forward.
In the Philippines, which is one of the last nations on earth not to have legal provisions for divorce, most engaged couples are first-time brides and grooms who tend to plan their weddings strongly influenced by what they may have seen on social or traditional media. Their lexicon of wedding signifiers is also greatly influenced by their wedding suppliers who are seen as industry experts and therefore more authoritative on what “belongs” in a wedding. Media studies scholar Jens Ruchatz writes:
“The professional is invited as expert for wedding imagery, for the conventional and cultural aspect of the wedding, as specialist in turning photograph traces into symbolic messages… Private photography and weddings have in common the encompassing of private as well as public, highly individual as well as collective aspects. It should therefore be only logical that wedding pictures are visibly more conventionalized than other branches of personal photography.”
This brings us back to readability. More than just making an event look festive or formal, wedding suppliers are experts at constructing what reads as bridal. This is why suppliers are able to charge higher rates for weddings (compared to similar work outside of weddings) - because of their ability to make the wedding readable. This is what my parents’ photographer seemed to lack: the initiative to code his photographs as bridal. But even without that initiative, their wedding photos remain readable because of all the other elements that happen to be in place: the white dress, the hair and makeup, the barong, the officiant, the flowers.
The implication here is that all wedding suppliers participate in the construction of wedding photography, not just the photographer: from the florist to the makeup artist to the caterer and the dressmaker. Beyond their individual meanings, the ability of wedding signifiers to communicate that a wedding has or is taking place remains their primary objective. More alternatively minded or even LGBTQ couples who might prefer more subversive signifiers in their events will also choose to retain at least a few traditional signifiers to keep their event readable: whether it’s the formal wear, the “giving away” of the bride (or groom in some cases), or even the presence of a religious officiant. The wedding industry is an ecosystem that specializes in producing readable wedding signifiers, and wedding photography is one of the means through which these signifiers become perpetuated. This speaks to the power of these wedding signifiers, their indispensability in wedding photography, and the hold of the wedding industry on the way we talk about and visualize weddings.
2023
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