Photography and Beauty: Let the Vendors Know

I think they're finally starting to listen to us. Maybe some of the wedding vendors and blogs are starting to understand that their images and blogs subtly exclude us from the definition of "bride" because we don't fit their "marketable" physical description. And maybe, just maybe, if we start to discuss it more openly, vendors and mainstream image-heavy blogs will start to treat all their clients with respect for their unique beauty.

Splendid Communications is a wedding and hospitality industry social media consulting firm, run by Leine Stevens of Blue Orchid Events. Her Think Splendid blog is one of the few wedding industry blogs I read, primarily for its insight into general business principles (really, it's that good.)  Stevens is a major wedding industry player, which is why I nearly jumped out of my chair upon reading her post today: "Online Marketing and the Plus Sized Bride."  If you haven't read it yet, go NOW. She makes a real case - the first I've seen from such an influential position - that photographers and blogs are complicit in creating the unattainable beauty ideals many of us are railing against. She calls out the hush-hush practice of photographers who won't blog their "less attractive" couples and points out that it doesn't make good business sense (not to mention good people sense.)

I've already made the decision to not hire a photographer who doesn't respect all their clients by featuring a variety of looks, weight, races and ages.  The local photographers I hope to highlight in future posts will have to meet that criteria as well. Money talks, and our dollars and feedback matter.  So please, if this issue matters to you at all, go read the Think Spendid blog today and comment.  Or go comment on the Offbeatbride Facebook Fan page, where a similar conversation is taking place.  I promise, for today at least, the wedding industry is listening. 

Thoughts on Fancy Invitations

I'm a complete paper snob.  I admit it, I love pretty paper and could spend entirely gleeful days inside Paper Source.  To give you an idea of how ridiculous I can be, one of our biggest disagreements ever actually happened inside Paper Source because we seriously disagreed on paper combinations for a non-wedding related decoupage art project. That's right, we nearly had a public brawl over color and pattern because he's as firm in his design principles as I am in mine. So, it should come as no surprise that the moment Jason mentioned the term "save the date" I was ready with fifteen examples over which we could bicker, ranging from maps, to music posters, photobooth mick-ups, vintage postcards and colorful modern designs. Lord help us both.

Having said all that, we're probably going with emailed save the dates, and invitations are so far down on my list of wedding priorities that I'm tempted to just phone everyone to let them know about the wedding. (Don't sound so shocked.  You know we're going to be phoning them anyhow for addresses and you-didn't-rsvp-but-are-you-coming follow-ups anyhow.) After months of examples underscoring the relative unimportance of exquisitely designed invitations, it was the invitations from this past weekend's very elegantly high-end wedding that finally convinced me to eff it and focus our particular project efforts and major expenses elswhere.

Example #1: An Invitation Does Not a Wedding Make
When my Jewish tomboy friend decided to get married in a private ceremony and invite everyone to a Moroccan blow out reception the next day, I wasn't expecting to recieve a invitation decorated with gold angels and bows. Well, I recieved an ivory decoration covered with gold angels and bows. Saying that their invitation was neither a reflection upon her, her husband nor the look-and-feel of their wedding is, um, putting it mildly. However, it was an inadvertant reflection upon her wedding priorities overall, since the DIY invitation kits were the result of such a quick shopping trip at Michaels that she didn't notice the angels. (Or the bows.) She just saw a basic gold leaf design and was too busy/didn't care enough to take them back for an exchange. While there may have been some good natured teasing from her peers because the invitations were so extremely out of character, in the end it was a funny moment that didn't intrude on the reception at all. Promise.

Example #2: USPS Doesn't Care About Your Fancy Invitation
On the other hand, I have a feeling that a recent Bat Mitzvah invitation we recieved meant a lot to the girl who picked it, giant pink hearts, matching pink envelope and all. Along with her entire Bat Mitzvah, this invitation mattered to her and she was invested in it.  Unfortunately, USPS wasn't nearly as invested and the invitation arrived as a crumpled mess. It was so battered that we had to press the RSVP card in order to send our reply. It was so damaged I wouldn't be surprised if you told me a postal worker had purposely balled it up and basketball tossed it in his delivery bag.  At least it reminded me of the ultimate transience of our wedding design efforts, even if I wasn't quite ready to let go of my invitation design schemes yet.

Example #3: Eff It Already
After all my excitement about crafting highly personalized invitations, I actually had to pause upon recieving the invitation for this past weekend's high WASP wedding. Although it ranks well up there with the classiest wedding I may ever attend, the invitations didn't exactly leap off the page. Instead, we recieved cream (or perhaps ecru) heavy paper invitations, printed with black embossed lettering in a cursive font, slipped in with a velum cover, an envelope liner, and a response card.  Simple, understated, and done. No registry information, no website information, no elegantly designed swirls or playful colors, just the basic expected information for a wedding.  But the biggest ah-ha moment came with the envelope because, despite having my head stuck up the bum of wedding planning for the last several months, I didn't notice the stamps AT ALL.  In fact, I had actually recycled the envelope before Jason wondered aloud about the stamps. If I recall properly (which I probably don't) I think they were the LOVE stamps.  

And that was the moment I decided to let the invitations go.  We'll put some effort into designing a single page invitation, sure, but I'm going to try and keep it all in perspective: it doesn't reflect a bit on the wedding, it may well get crumpled in the post, and no one's going to pay one iota of attention to the stamps (including other recently married/engaged women). Also, please remind me of this post when I'm making myself hysterical about fonts six months from now. Please.

Having said all that, if you haven't seen if already, you should absolutely check out Rachel's (from Heart of Light) 100 Layer Cake DIY guests posts right now. If invitations are a priority for you, and DIY was part of your plan, yesterday's invitation post is a great starting point.

Celebrating Shoes and Complexities

Hi. I've been a bit MIA in the last few days and I apologize. I've both been dealing with significant personal issues and trying to process the overwhelming response to last week's "You Won't Find Beauty in the Portraits" article. Since the post got crosslinked on both East Side Bride and Weddingbee, I've been getting a definite range of reactions in comments and emails, all of which were thoughtful and all of which I appreciate. The initial post started out as a "your joy will be beautiful" post and somehow ended up as a challenge to popularly celebrated wedding portraiture, details shots, and "mainstream" blogs. I stand by everything I said in that rant (hoo boy it needed to be said after I read dozens of I'm-going-to-look-awful/need-to-lose-weight posts last week) but it's only part of the story. Because, while I'm entirely fed up with how wedding media began warping my hopes for a simpler, emotion-filled and joy-filled occasion into an opportunity for a vintage-y event that denotes simplicity and carefreeness in its carefully chosen details, I get it too.  Because darnit, I like the details, particularly because they're fun, work the creative non-excel focused part of my brain, and they're pretty.

Yes, even though this blog has focused more on planning angst and big-picture/eye-on-the-prize posts, I like the pretty.

• I like pretty photography (define as you will. I have a very particular aesthetic that may not float your boat, but it certainly floats mine) and I'll be making time for formal portraits. Not a ton of time, mind you, but time enough to have a formal record for our families and family history.
• I'm a little obsessed with collecting succulent inspiration ideas for our So-Cal wedding. 
• I perhaps spend too much time daydreaming about these inspiration boards made by our DOC, Sweet Emilia Jane, for our wedding.
• I love shoes. I can't exactly afford them right now, seeing as how I'm saving for a wedding, but I appreciate a few shoe posts now and then.  

So yeah, I'm the last person who won't get excited about shoes because it's not marriage related.  Personally, I don't care two whits about shoe pictures at the wedding (again, detail shots aren't my thing), but I know I want fabulous, colorful, comfortable, inexpensive (for me), rewearable, shoes.  I choose to spend (some very limited) time on (selected) popular wedding sites because I appreciate the help in thinking about how to make my wedding more inexpensive, sustainable, and yet pretty (and then I run away again very quickly before the aspirationalism and budget envy and body image issues creep in).  Because heck, if it were just me trying to come up with party ideas, I'd be left saying well, um, organic DIY flowers? Does this mean I have to buy vases? What's floral tape? Shiiit.

Those sites have their place. Indie wedding planning sites and communities have their place, particularly as a balance against one or two overriding aesthetic points of view or wedding approaches that don't fit what many of us may really want. More personal-blog contemplative sites have their place as a space to sort it out for ourselves, away from advertising dollars and reliance on "tradition." I'm not really a fan of any of these labels and I'm a big fan of working-it-out-for-yourself, which means there's no category for my blog except perhaps over-analytical-yet-occasionally-superficial-goofball wedding site.

This blog is simply an attempt to make sense of wedding planning in a way that makes sense with the specific life that my partner and I are building. I'm grappling with the institution of marriage and what it means to be a wife and married versus just me. I'm grappling with the wedding symbolism and expectations that feel gendered and constrictive. I'm struggling with what it means to be publicly coupled and how that's shifting people's perceptions of me and us in ways I hadn't anticipated.  I'm banging my head against the wall of our limited-yet-overwhelmingly-huge budget. I'm trying to plan a sustainable wedding and support local vendors. I'm running smack into self-esteem issues that I thought I'd put aside years ago because I'm now faced with the horrific bridal pressure to look the Best You've Ever Looked for the Most Important (and Most Photographed!) Day of Your Life (or what, he or she will run down the aisle in horror because they suddenly realized you don't look like a movie star?) I'm working on finding a synagogue and writing a meaningful ceremony and combining finances and figuring out chore charts and cooking responsibilities and building the healthy foundations of a life together. I'm dealing with family and personal challenges and way too many hours at the office. And in the midst of all that, I'm also struggling with how to achieve a pretty, welcoming wedding with an easy flow and a great party.

This site is a space for my wedding planning, my priorities, my frustrations, my personal bullshit meter, and my wish-I'd-had-this resource gathering (with a slight emphasis on LA couples' needs and general sustainability questions). It's not an indie wedding site or or a budget wedding site or a feminist wedding site or whatever other terms and signifiers we're using to define our various wedding blog communities and their intersections, and yet it's all of those things too. But it's also place to celebrate succulents, shoes, out-of-the-box reception ideas, lower-key wedding alternatives, and the lives that frame our weddings and make them worthwhile in the first place.  It's not an attack on anyone else's weddings or choices.  It's not an attack on the people whose weddings are featured on photo-heavy blogs or on anyone's individual photographic priorities.  And it's not an attack on anyone who is lucky enough to actually be as conventionally attractive as the people whose weddings generally get featured on those blogs.

In conclusion, I like shoes, I like pretty, I'm both conflicted and overjoyed with this process of planning a wedding/marriage, and I really like that moment when I burst into tears at a wedding. Thanks for reading along.

The Heart of the Matter

We attended a wedding this past weekend.  It was the first wedding we've attended since getting engaged, but I wasn't really worried about comparisons to gathering inspiration, perhaps because the high WASP wedding context was so far removed from our own more casual future celebration, and perhaps because the context was so besides the point for a couple I adore so entirely.

After being steeped in all the glorious inspiration here in the less bound-by-tradition wedding world, I think I actually appreciated their more classic event all the more. There were certainly small touches that hinted at the couple's personalities, but there was no angst about floral centerpieces or her designer dress or the semi-religious Episcopalian service and the Corinthians reading. It was simply a wedding, exactly how you might picture it progressing from a fortunate Southern California beach-view vantage point. It's the sort of event that some of us might write off as "cookie cutter," particularly if we're the sort who might consider slaving away on a pile of whimsically gocco'd programs.

We'd be wrong.

After all of my concerns about making the day personal and a reflection of our values, their wedding was a solid reminder that the most personal aspect of a wedding is the promise made in the vows.  It didn't matter that the readings and (mostly) Episcopalian ceremony didn't include handpicked poetry and wasn't a self-written reflection on their relationship and future. It didn't matter that their vows were minimally personalized, instead relying on the ritual of standard Christian vows. The moment they said "I will" and I saw their faces light up with the full comprehension of their incredibly personal promise to each other, I burst into tears. 

There couldn't have been a more personal and intimate moment, regardless of the words and ceremony used to frame it.  And when I gave the groom a giant hug on the dance floor later that night, he was still beaming from the impact of that moment. This man, the heart and soul of his college's fraternity and the impetus behind countless drunken crazy adventures throughout town here, was entirely overwhelmed with joy from the sheer act of his promise. He was still filled with that moment as he said to me, hours later, "This is amazing. I'm married. I'm just trying to take it all in. It's all rushing by so quickly. This is just so incredible."

As I talked it over later with our friends who were married a year and a half ago, they both nodded along in perfect understanding.  He recalled the incredible feelings from his own wedding upon realizing you're marrying this other person, knowing that you're entering into the rightest decision of your life, and of wishing the ceremony could have lasted even longer.

And that's the heart of the matter. That's the feeling we're really chasing throughout all our planning and budgeting and angst. And that moment will happen. It may end up looking like a DIY craft fest or a Martha Stewart masterpiece, and either will be stunning and will simply add an extra touch to the intrinsic beauty of the day.  On Saturday, we were privileged to witness the marriage of our dear friends and to share in the raucous joy of their 12-piece band reception party.  They got engaged a week after we did and, with only six months of planning and a different social context, they didn't have time or interest in the intense personalization (of either the vow-related sort or the aesthetic detail-focused sort) that's been so easy for us to get caught up in.  But, whereas they had only six months to prepare for the wedding, they've had seven years to prepare for this marriage. The wedding was both the public promise and a party to celebrate their commitment. And that's all that mattered on Saturday.

Exceptions

Just to clarify this a bit, I don't hate all wedding portraits. In fact, I think our mothers might murder me if we forewent them altogether. (And I'm not entirely sure we'd guarantee a photo of my brother without a set portrait list, which would be altogether distressing when flipping through the albums in years to come.) So I get it.  But, I really can't stand the way mainstream blogs have begun celebrating the "artistic" bride and groom shots that look like magazine-perfect, flattened-personality, pretty-yet-cold, editorial-worthy photos. Maybe one or two, I could forgive. But I've literally had to scroll past pages of these portraits before ever hitting the good scrunchy-face-and-tears stuff on some big-time photographers blogs. And these portraits seem to be the first bride-and-groom (yeah, it's usually bride-and-groom) shots celebrated on most mainstream photo-heavy blogs. And sometimes the scrunchy-face-and-tears photos never get featured at all.

Blech.  My portraits are going to rock because they're going to be as ridiculous as we are.  In fact, I quite like ridiculous posed portraits. For example, of all the weddings I've pored through on the internet, this was the first portrait that made me jump up and say Hell Yeah.

Ridiculousness courtesy of the Thirty-Something Bride. Photo by Jonathon Campbell

In Louise's own words: "I'm not exactly sure how this started, but my brother and I have been doing this for decades. If I'm remembering it correctly, he and I were young and were acting up (Southern for misbehaving) one day. Someone (I want to say my dad, but it could have been my mom) told us to knock it off and to stop acting like little cretins. The adults left the room and I asked Austin what a cretin was. He made this weird face at me and made a strange sort of snorting noise and said, "That's a cretin." I mimicked him the best I could and said, "Like this?" And he said, "Yeah, like that!" And thus, The Cretin Face was born. It lives on to this day."

Um, I'm a total cretin, and I totally love this.  Particularly because Jason and I have a ridiculous face ritual of our own.  And good lord if we DON'T include it in our posed photos, it will be an entirely inauthentic wedding. Here's us being normal... or a good approximation thereof. (Excuse the shiny faces because, as you will clearly see, our ridiculousness requires a wee bit of alcohol.)

Now, here's us doing the "spitty face":

It started years ago when a friend introduced us to a website devoted to people making these faces (no, I can't remember it now) and it immediately became our group's thing. We own the spitty face, at every semi-tipsy gathering.  Since then, it's just radiated outward, across the nation. We've managed to convince nearly ALL our tipsy friends to get in on the fun (the above photos were taken in Brooklyn, by two equally spitty-faced fools who shall remain nameless for the purposes of this post). I think we have dozens of these things - of us, various groups of friends, and my boss (yes, really). Because admit it, the spitty face is just that awesome. After a beer or two you'd toooootally want to try too.  In fact, I'm going to see if I can convince my mother to join in with the fun at the wedding.  My dad might be hesitant, but I bet I could convince my mom to take part in some mother-daughter spitty faces. 

So yes, I make a firm exception for portraiture ridiculousness and general personality. Because THIS is what I mean by authenticity. Hell Yeah.

In Honor of DC's Step Forward

After yesterday, I just wanted an easy and massive smile.  This very much fits the bill.

UPDATE: Boo. the YouTube video is now private and not working. But it was the cutest little boy talking about how he'd never met a husband and husband before, just husband and wife.  And then, as he wrapped his head around what it all meant, he simply asked the husband and husband to go play ping pong.

Simple as that.

You Won't Find Beauty in the Portraits

Spring is just around the corner, which would be great except that it means bikini season is just around the corner. And, more importantly for many readers here, wedding season is around the corner and you "need" to look bikini-ready for that dress.  And even worse than the how-do-I-lose-ten-pounds-fast-and-entirely-unhealthily panic is the oh-fuck-I-have-to-take-pictures despair.  Complete and utter despair.  Because you aren't as pretty as the gorgeous women featured on the major blogs.  Because your wedding won't have all of the gorgeous professionally designed details featured on all the major blogs.  Because you haven't seen yourself reflected in any of the literally thousands of weddings you've been pouring over in the last few months and so you already feel a little sad about your little stretched-budget wedding of ordinary people and ordinary marriage hopes and ordinary joy.

Usually I censor my language a bit. However, after a few angst-ridden posts and twitterings around the wedding web, I'm too angry to care, so please bear with me here.

Turn away from those fucking blogs right now and reclaim your wedding. For yourself. Because your love isn't ordinary. It's rooted in your unique how-we-met story and your own we-snorted-soda-out-of-our-noses stories and your individual how-the-hell-would-I-have-made-it-here-without-this-partner stories.  Your love is gorgeous and obvious and entirely personal.  And it will shine through in the pictures.  And it will illuminate your faces with complete and utterly stunning joy.

I know. You want to believe me. You really do. But you've never seen a photo of a bride who looks like you: maybe not blond, maybe not white, maybe not straight, maybe not slim, maybe not photogenic.  Well, that's because someone running the mainstream blogs you read perhaps can't write insightful content and context but instead posts a bunch of photos.  And perhaps, due to an over-reliance on photos submitted by photographers desperate for exposure who send in only their prettiest clients for wedding submissions, this person is under the misguided impression that beauty exists in a narrow strata of near-impossibility. And, perhaps most importantly, that blog you read is focused on "detail" shots and posed bridal portaits in which bone structure matters more than emotion, because bone structure is immediate and easy and advertiser-friendly.

You know what I think about detail shots and wedding portraits?  Yawn.  Just. Fucking. YAWN.  You know what I think is beautiful?

Photos courtesy of Hazelnut Photography

Photo via Jezebel

There it is.  Stripped of bone structure and excuses about culturally defined norms of beauty. Stripped of perfectly lit poses and perfectly chosen backdrops.  No worries about weight, wrinkles, or whatever the hell anyone else was thinking. Just perfect moments of honest gorgeousness.
 THIS is beauty.  It may not meet the bullshit criteria of the wedding blogs we frequent, but fuck those blogs.  Those blogs won't make you uncontrollably smile to yourself fifteen anniversaries from now.  Those blogs and their cold notion of detached-portraiture-as-wedding-beauty won't break your heart into a million little pieces of joy whenever you look at them.  Instead, those blogs suck honesty from the concept of weddings and leave us with vintage dressers artfully placed in fields surrounded by prancing people in suits and white dresses.  They leave us emotionally empty, yet yearning for some unreal image of a wedding day that never existed.

I don't know about you, but my prancing will be of the oh-hell-yes-I-love-you-SO-DAMN-MUCH-can-I-kiss-you-again-and-again-and-again variety.  My wedding will happen surrounded by family and friends and love and not in the privacy of a damn field with good lighting.  And if my photographer doesn't capture those ugly messy kisses and that sea of community love, I will rip them to shreds in my vendor recap. Because they will have entirely missed what's essential and essentially beautiful about the day in lieu of a magazine editorial/marketing shoot.

On your wedding day, your face will scrunch up with emotion.  Your makeup will run.  You will forget anyone else is in the room besides this person who you are entirely and utterly in love with.  Simply put, you will be resplendent in utterly beatific joy.  And why would you want it any other way?

Fuck you, mainstream wedding blogs.  I challenge you to hold up your posed images of "beautiful" people against the joyful photos above and tell me that your photos are better and more worthy of public celebration.  I challenge you to defend your narrow selection criteria and aesthetic "standards" for blog submissions and tell me these images and people aren't overwhelmingly beautiful.  I challenge you to remember that you're not just selling photography, event design, and paper goods services but that, in the process, you're selling us on your hollowed out definitions of weddings and where their intrinsic beauty lies.

Frankly, I'd bet against those blogs. I'd bet your readers overdosed on bullshit months ago and are yearning for real inspiration from images of sheer, unadulterated joy and not of empty, near-impossible, aspirationalism.  I'd bet we've all hidden away an image of what we really want our wedding to feel like, and it wasn't the one you gushed over.  So come on, readers, let's start a new inspiration file that reflects true beauty and joy here in the comments.  Which moments or wedding stories do you cling to when things get rough durning planning?  Which images stayed with you months after your wedding passed?  My money's on the messy kisses and tears.