What a Wedding Photo Fiasco Taught Me
a personal essay on memory, ownership, and forming ourselves after humiliation
Dear Reader,
Before you read this, I want you to know that I am writing about a person who harmed me in a very intimate way. I have no online connections with this person, and I make no effort to communicate with them. I do not want this person to be tracked, found, or doxed. I don’t wish that on them. They deserve their own life. My purpose wasn’t to protect her, but to protect those who read my words and know me in the ways I share online. I’ve seen the ways a readership will hunt people down seeking vengeance. I don’t want that. I stand firm knowing those who read my substack wouldn’t do that (thank you for your integrity!)… but it’s important to me that I write with an ethic of care in mind. I care about you, dear reader, and I don’t anyone to waste a moment of energy in places it doesn’t need to be. I carefully chose my words for this essay and I thoughtfully tell my story not to stir anger (which could happen) but to ignite perspective. Where there is perspective, there is hope.
Thanks for reading this post.
xo,
Camille
Ten years ago my husband and I wed at a little white chapel with a predominately Black congregation in front of our Black, Asian, and Mexican family members in a beach town with little diversity. The event was its own celebration of “love wins.” Through vows of devotion and awkwardly used Bible verses we intertwined our fates. This small congregation of Black Missionary Baptists delighted in hosting us and doing up the whole church to celebrate our union. Ours was their first wedding 20+ years and the groom’s stepfather was the Reverend. They spent 16 hours preparing food for the cookout which would be our wedding reception: ribs, chicken, potato salad, buttered biscuits, greens, and auntie’s famous pie (to name a few dishes). The church showed up. The church showed out.
There are many ways to enunciate the words “We adore you.” A hot plate and a good time are my favorite methods.
My wedding was the most important day of my life (at that time). I spent my church girl years anticipating it, praying for it, and preparing for it. In retrospect, I shudder knowing the sum of my prayers were about marriage. It’s who I was and how I was formed at the time. The white evangelical church taught me marriage and a quiverful would purify me, the Black Missionary Baptist church told me marriage would protect me. My body had no extra ears available to listen to other wisdoms. There I was, a bride who smiled because all her prayers were answered and all her answers were found in a sanctuary who knew me as goods before calling me good. But this isn’t a story about purity culture, it’s a story about the finer details found within known as friendship, race, and ownership.
Truth is, I did and didn’t want an elaborate wedding. My husband and I understood our shoestring budget and refusal to go into debt for a party were hindrances to the princess wedding dream. It didn’t feel like a compromise to want to go to the mountains and elope with a few friends. His fire and brimstone former stepdad told us eloping is shameful. We listened dutifully and got married in a chapel filled with people who held questionable theologies and good love. What theologies are not questionable? Things, even ideologies, must remain questionable and challengeable for human consciousness to expand. There will always be someone ready to strike another person’s belief down when given the right opportunity, amount of spite, and disregard to consequences. Weddings are complicated and people are complex. When complexity gathers it, like atoms, becomes a smattering of chaos moving randomly, changing directions, not knowing if it has found itself in a solution of high or low concentration. This is what wedding planning feels like. All expectation. All anxiety. All parts coming together to bask in a very strange thrill otherwise known as love. And isn’t the commemoration of love, especially the love given to Black women as we live and breathe, its own genre of art? I recall these words recently written by
:“The cementing of Black life as art - something cherished and made to be preserved - is a powerful act of revolution against a national backdrop of being seen as unimportant and disposable.”1
I am lucky to have the wedding I never dreamed of out there in the chapel by the sea. It wasn’t a big princess wedding. If we gauge love on the effeminate/infantilizing “you’re a princess” standard then we’ll continually find ourselves undernourished on connection and overfed on fantasy. I was a bride more familiar with expectation then tradition and I am currently laugh recalling how I was a young girl who thought herself a woman old enough to understand traditions. I now know traditions are prayers held through generations of open palms and questions ready to be answered. (I wish I asked more questions then.) I got nothing I wanted and everything I asked for and is that not an awkward and trusted measure of how loved you are? Maybe it isn’t but allow me to pride myself on a memory etched in the deepest understanding of love I had in a long-gone moment of time. We are growing beings, and I am still growing as I share this story. My grown self is battling the dreaming inner child who still feels slighted ten years later. I spent this decade wondering if I wanted to tell this story to the public because it felt too private, too self-victimizing, too vapid to share. I am not immune to criticism and judgement, I can handle it in small amounts but when the -isms and -ments come at you for what you share in vulnerability it runs risk of breaking a person. There is not enough calcium in the world able to fortify a brittle ego. I am not one who delights in breaking.
For ten years I have kept my own personal breaking close to my chest. At least the breaking associated with my wedding. The memory still hurts not because I struggled to plan and prepare a wedding, nor was it family complications, or a wedding dress in shambles (Reader, the latter didn’t happen. My dress was perfect. I bought it for $100 from a little thing called Pennysaver.) It’s how the memories were preserved. Our memories are like empty clothes ready for us to wear them again. They beckon us to come over and give sinews to their hollow bones. Pick me, a memory will beg, I will show you how much I love you if you delight in me. I bear the hollow skeleton of moments and memories from our wedding day but no evidence to claim for myself or share with my children. They were withheld from me.
I’ll bookmark this part of the story and flip a few pages back. When my husband and I were planning our wedding what was most important to me was having photos. I am a memory keeper and enthusiastic scrapbooker. Give me a sticker collection, add some throw away photos from a disposable camera, and I will fashion something less than a masterpiece but more than a struggling doodle. I’ll do it with fondness, and isn’t the endearing obsession with a creators’ fondness the most important part of art? I wanted our wedding photos. I considered opening a new credit card just to afford them. (I didn’t A friend who just so happened to be a professional photographer offered to take our wedding photos for free. No contract, just trust. I yipped at the good fortune. I knew her portfolio and looked forward to having our wedding day photos taken care of by a woman who is bubbly and professional.
If you are reading this and you understand The Culture, know that yes she was and yes I should have known and damnit I guess a part of this misfortune is my fault because I shouldn’t have trusted her.
My wedding day lasted about twelve hours. She was with us for the entire day, snapping pictures and saving moments. In the end we only received four pictures from her.
I’m not a specialist in numerology or angel numbers. I won’t waste your time trying to make the number four feel like a holy offering. What of I know of the number four is its relationship to wisdom, but I’d rather associate it with another substance called luck. There are four gospels, four leaf clovers, four elements, and four directions, and four cardinal virtues. Four isn’t as fancy a number as its counterparts. (I’m not one who’s keen on numerical bigotry). Four is a number commonly used to categorize miracles and create systems of organization humanity can abide by. If you did not know there were four elements, how would you survive in the wilderness? If you could not name the four seasons, how would you understand time? If you didn’t have the four directions on a cardinal map, how would you move through the world? We’re a society dependent on things categorized into quarters. We’re lucky because we have systems in place (coincidentally organized into quarters) to help us navigate life. Luck isn’t dumb, it is evidence we can be trained and sustained. Receiving only four photos from my wedding day was a training in believing how I should be lucky to have any at all. This pitiful offering (and the photographers silence to all my requests) communicated a sunken message: four photos will serve as sustainable evidence of our marriage.
What’s most painful is how I begged for our photos. I am not opposed to begging when it is done tastefully in ballads sung in passionate quartets of Black men who knew they did wrong to their lover. I cannot disassociate begging with wrongdoing. I spent nearly-two-years begging the white woman wedding photographer. “Please send us the wedding photos you promised us.” When the begging stopped, silence took over. The silence of defeat is the loudest kind because we don’t tell anyone what’s hurting us, we internalize the ache and direct every sharpened blade of rumination towards ourselves. I fell deeper and deeper into the belief that I did something wrong. Was I a bridezilla? Did I order people around when I didn’t mean to? Did I ask for too much? Did I not protect her from a sharp remark from a family member? She offered to do it for free, was it my fault for believing her and not pulling a line of credit to pay her? If four is a number humans use to train and sustain then the meager four photos I received felt like a training in “this should be good enough for you.” Eventually this training evolved into self-judgement and shame. “Why are wedding photos so important anyway?!” I’d ask myself, “Don’t be dramatic. Just move on!”
I knew this internal language I created for myself was built on lies but they were the only things suppressing all my mourning and regret. I was humiliated. I deserve the fulfillment of a promise and I never received it. She blocked my phone calls, ignored my voicemails, and left my texts unread. I stopped begging before our marriage was two-years old. My husband and I were expecting our first baby, I didn’t want to be a mama with scorn. Instead, I let the disappointment settle in my chest and accepted a lie I replayed in my head: I deserve this disrespect. I was forming myself into a mama who believed whatever existed below the bare minimum was feast enough for me and mine. I told myself it was foolish of me to want more. I stopped telling people about the betrayal because it would make them mad and I was, at the time, too much of a people pleaser to spark those feelings in others.
There is a deeper conversation about race in this story. I am a Black and Asian woman married to a Chicano man. To be a couple of color who spent over one year begging a white woman for tangible evidence that we were loved and cherished by our community is demoralizing. At the core of every conversation of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism is the topic of ownership. Sometimes that topic presents itself as a question like “who owns who?” and other times the topic is presented as a statement “this/you belong/s to me.” But any conflict on ownership will always always be about who owns history. Whether it is global history, family history, the history of a relationship doesn’t matter. History is memory and memory dictates policy. Who do we become if we cannot remember ourselves? How do we operate in the world? There is a special pain associated with knowing a piece of my history is lost and cannot be passed down to our children. We celebrated our ten year anniversary in May. I am still learning to say goodbye to the memory of our genesis.
I made a promise to myself at our two-year anniversary. I would no longer try to reach out to this woman. I have no desire to drench my family and the generations following us into rivers of spite. I let her go – which I’m learning is the step beyond forgiveness. I’ve grown up in many versions of Christianity. The bit about forgiveness is tantamount. What we don’t talk about is the freedom of not feeling the burden to forgive someone continually. I won’t wake up in the morning with a soul check to make sure if I forgive her. She gets to deal with the internal consequences of her regrettable mistakes. I don’t have to bear the burden of it. My name isn’t Atlas. Being Jesus Jr isn’t on my resume. My body already bears too much. The two-year anniversary promise I made to myself, my husband, and our lovely newborn baby was twofold. I’d stop begging and I’d look towards the future. I promised my husband we would live our lives, document our memories, and elope on our ten-year anniversary. We will be surrounded by our children. They’ll witness the commemoration of love and devotion with all their senses.
Last May we vacationed to Yosemited National Park and eloped under Bridal Veil Falls. I wore my original chapel-length wedding veil. He wore his favorite satin guyabera. Our daughter wore her own veil. Our sons wore the guayaberas their abuela bought from their pueblo outside of Jalisco. We were surrounded by trees, water, rocks, and rainbows. Our elopement was documented by a dear friend and exquisite photographer
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I’m drawn to the words of
on the pursuit of Archival Communion. Wedding photos are a memory. It is memory love, which offers us the richest and most complicated of human experiences. My husband and I are different from the people we were 10 years ago: we are aged, our bodies are bigger, our spirituality weathered, our faces are older, our endurance is rooted, and we’ve allowed parenthood to form our perspective. There is no beloved community, elders, or siblings who surround us in these photos. I cannot see what color dress Sis Trenice wore, Don’s smile when he served his famous ribs, or Brother Ricky’s open-mouthed laugh. There is no photo where my mother holds my hand, or my father holds me as we dance. (These are things I deeply grieve.) These new elopement photos hold us and our children. We are not wide-eyed and hopeful; we are wise-eyed and rooted. The love between us grew with each day of marriage. This is who we are now. This is how our love will be archived.“Within the experience of Archival Communion, we get to move through portals of preservation, memory, legacy, spirit, connection & research. This embodied exploration allows us to relate with forgotten memories we want to remember for ourselves and the people we wish to share it with, learn more historical & cultural contexts about the things and people we care about, create a practice, language and relationship around preservation/documentation, and participate in cultural activism.”2
I am a lover of romance and a sucker for happy endings. We live in a world that treats happy endings as though it is a cake to feast on in this weary world. I am a woman of color, I know that a dessert served so simply is something to be suspicious of. I believe happy endings are not the cake but the knife – it is long and serrated, using its saw-like teeth to gently cut and reshape that which it touches to form the good that belongs to us. I still mourn what wasn’t given to me as I cut and shaped my way into creating what is mine. I’m carving a path and preparing a way for the lineage following me.
I am so happy to have our elopement photos. Celeste’s talent is incomparable. I also know our marriage story isn’t over: I am still madly (sometimes maddeningly) in love with my husband; this love we share grows stronger every day. I am now a woman of color holding my knife, forming this life which is mine and ensuring I will receive what cannot be withheld from me.
Tell me something good.
Thank you so much for reading this essay. It was difficult one to write and felt like a necessary story to share. I felt quite nauseous as I was writing it, knowing that it’d be out in the world. Is there a story from your life that you want to write because it is difficult and necessary?
What is a special photo that you have in your personal archives?
How are you using your proverbial knife to form that life that belongs to you?
From the post “13 Weeks of Adventure: Week 1…” by Rachel Leake
From the post “Remembrance through Archival Communion” by Love Souley
My goodness, Camille. I sure am glad that you added the disclaimer, but I still can't help but feel angry at the theft of tangible reminders of such a significant day. That lady does not own your history, her arms are too tiny to hold all the complexity of love demonstrated that day.
But these photos? With your babies? At Bridal's Veil , underneath rainbows? With all your knowings and all the question marks of your genesis bent into commas? This is archived history. So much unexpected fruition. Triumph.
I hope this was catharsis. Sankofa. You went back and got what was yours.
My heart aches for you and yours! Those Yosemite photos are stunning! I did not have a positive wedding experience and hated how the pictures turned out and have no good feelings looking at them. But we did a redo of our portraits on our favorite nature trail with our 4mo old son with a different photographer. They were PERFECT. So perfect that I can now have those photos hanging up in our house and feel in awe of our love. I’m sad our loved ones weren’t involved in the redo photos but we needed SOMETHING to have that documented our happiness more accurately. Sending love!