Before and after the wedding
This photo of a messy make-up table was taken minutes before the author’s wedding. Here, she reflects on how a hasty image can embody the tension between innocent anticipation and the unfolding of history.
This messy table is very dear to me. I see my sister’s make-up tools scattered all over, clearly already used. The cotton pad dirty with foundation shows the make-up needed a few do-overs before we got it right. Next to cotton swabs I spot the blue box with mints I had bought a day prior. I wonder why we brought the German hairspray that says “cheat day for your hair”. The pink roses in the corner, together with the white hairpiece, probably point the viewer to the occasion this photo was taken. I snapped this shot just before my wedding photographer came into this room to take a few official photos of the groom and me in our outfits, half an hour before our wedding ceremony.
I like the awkwardness and hastiness of the photo, just as I like the messiness of the table itself. The awkward angle betrays that I have no eye for photography at all, but the fact I took it anyway shows that I have an acute sense of the possible historical weight of moments like these. I was sure the mess held something meaningful that would be important later. As if I am studying for a grand test at the end of my life, where I will be quizzed on the details.
I am still waiting for the photographer to send me the official wedding portraits that were taken just after this moment. I’m sure I’ll love them, as I love all wedding photography. I am not steeped in artistic circles, but even I know wedding photography is not regarded very highly as an art form. The wedding photographer simply delivers what the client wants, and weddings are a hot bed of bad taste and kitsch.
Some would say getting married in the first place is bad taste, because marriage is a patriarchal capitalist institution, or because public displays of happy love are anti-social and rude. But I am not among those people. I love wedding photography, and not solely because I love looking at wedding dresses, even the kitschiest ones. I somehow enjoy its inherent drama.
This photo of the make-up table was to remind me of the feeling I had before my wedding, and in a similar way every wedding photo is a “before” photo to me. I cannot help but look at them with a bit of a shiver of excitement and dread, especially when the pair looks happy and hopeful. “If only they knew…”, is the thought that inevitably crosses my mind.
This thought is always appropriate. Sometimes in small ways: “If only they knew someone would spill a glass of red wine all over the groom’s suit just after this photoshoot.” Or bigger ways: “If only they knew then that their future child would ruin their relationship, that the wife would years later start an affair with one of the wedding guests, if only they knew all the unique and specific ways in which they would slowly grow to hate each other in the decades to come.”
And then there are the truly big ways in which this thought can be haunting. “If only they knew about the war.”
There was a time as a kid when I actively sought out this uncanny feeling. Where I could stare at photos of cheerful weddings in the Netherlands in the 1930s, and would almost want to scream at the party guests: “Don’t you know what’s coming?”
Would we ever smile in a photo if we were fully aware of what awaited us?
All to say: I find wedding photos quite chilling. When I see shots of my wedding day on my phone, I tend to pre-grieve my life. “Ah yes, here all was well. Look at those pink roses, at that tiny box of mints, silent witnesses to this moment of dramatic irony. If only I knew…” A Dutch artist in the 1970s coined the phrase “guilty landscape”, for the trees and forests that witnessed the violence of World War II but simply kept on growing as if nothing had happened. At my most dramatic moments, I treat the eyeshadow palette on the messy table almost the same way. As an uncaring witness to a very dramatic moment, where nothing horrible has happened just yet.
This is, of course, misguided. Weddings do not only take place before disaster strikes. The innocence of this moment is a myth. At the time of this particular photo, many sad events were unfolding already, in my own life, but in infinitely more gruesome ways in the world at large. Just as the Dutch weddings in the 1930s took place during the Holodomor, and other crimes and tragedies I know little about.
