Trash The Dress

TRASH THE DRESS
A bride in a beautiful white wedding dress stands by a large hole several hundred yards into the jungles of Mexico. Followed by her immaculately clothed groom, she descends a ladder into the darkness, eventually entering the waist-high water on the floor of a Cenote cave. Flying bats veer crazily by her face, causing her to shriek, as she and her groom make their way toward a sort of island in the middle of a cavern, her dress dragging in the water. As they reach their goal, they step into a beam of light from the cave roof, and then strobes pop as photographers begin snapping pictures while the bats continue to swoop around them.

The result: Stunning, otherworldly photos unlike any of the shots produced at their wedding two days earlier; photos that express the couple’s personalities through a setting that may have been inconceivable in the past. And yet it works; the bride and groom’s love and dedication starkly highlighted and amplified in a mind-blowing, once-in-a-lifetime scene. The wedding dress may have gotten a little…um, trashed, but it was well worth it. After all, these moments will last forever through the photos.

Brides and grooms want awesome imagery from their wedding, period. They want the unscripted moments captured, but they also want a photographer that can get very creative during a portrait session. That’s why couples everywhere are donning their wedding finery and not only descending into caves, but plunging into breakers, walking through abandoned amusement parks, wandering through cornfields, wading into forest streams and chasing other wild pursuits in an increasingly popular ritual and edgy extension of wedding photojournalism called Trash the Dress (TTD).

More couples these days are favoring the un-styled, un-planned moments of the wedding rather than the prescribed agenda of highly organized groups of people staring at the camera. As a married couple who often work together on TTD sessions, they have no shortage of enthusiastic newlyweds anxious to experience this ritual, with the number of interested people growing by the week.


REJECTING TRADITION: EMBRACING THE NEW AND UNUSUAL
So why all the interest in this unorthodox form of portraiture? Some photographers have become known for edgy, over-the-top Trash The Dress images. I prefer to shoot in a way that showcases the love surrounding the couple, yet I most definitely see the growing TTD trend as anti-traditional, a rejection of what has come before.

My brides are not only seeking out photos that are creative, artistic or fun, they have this stigma that is attached to their parents’ wedding photos – the setting up of the shots, the perfect dress and so forth. They dream about how horrible it would be for that to happen to them. So anything that jumps away from that makes life way happier for these brides. They’re trying to escape that traditional world of the wedding photographer making sure your dress is perfectly clean or spaced out uniformly over the ground.”

The growing trend in destination weddings is another factor that plays largely in the rising popularity of TTD. “Everyone just looks around and says ‘wow’ when they see the beautiful beaches, crystal clear water and exotic ruins, brides started realizing ‘hey, this is liberation.’ Everyone has a sense of adventure. So here comes an opportunity to book a session, climbing around on pyramids or swimming in a cave, and it’s available.”



ENVIRONMENTAL PORTRAITURE AS PHOTOJOURNALISM
Great environmental portraits are no more a fad or a trend than any great wedding photojournalism. TTD is photojournalistic in that through this form of expression brides and grooms are saying something about who they really are. Yet because this form of portraiture is so different, the media will often misinterpret and belittle the TTD approach, as if the only purpose was to destroy the wedding dress as some sort of narcissistic gag. I’ve seen some really bad TV interviews where they were treating this as a joke, they make it look cheesy and artless.

In fact, this rising form of expression is following a well-trod path of both wedding and news photojournalism – putting the subject in a location that adds context and meaning to who they are. It’s brides being themselves, expressing how crazy or free or how removed they are from their parents’ photographs.

TTD sessions usually happen one or two days after the wedding, providing the luxury of an open schedule for capturing great imagery. Then you’re running against the clock. There’s not much time to shoot the bride, and after the ceremony you have to cover the reception, with not much opportunity in-between to think about going to another amazing place. With TTD you have all of the time and freedom to do all kinds of different stuff. It’s just a happy moment for the bride and groom and free rein for me to do whatever I want.


GETTING CREATIVE: THE MANY LEVELS OF TTD
Yet some brides may not want to totally trash their dress in water or mud, and there are in fact an unlimited number of ways to “step outside the box” with this kind of portraiture. Maybe the bride is only up for walking through fields, along railroad tracks or through abandoned buildings, all of which can work just as well. The risk to the dress is still there, of course, but real damage can be avoided.

It’s really difficult to define the levels, what is really considered ‘trash the dress’? How about sitting on horseback? It that actually trash the dress? Yes it is, because a bride would not ordinarily ever get on a horse. If they have something unique – something they’ve seen or have been inspired to do, I’ll do it.

Location, obviously, can really affect what kind of TTD session is possible, but any locale, from cities to cornfields, offer creative possibilities. If you’re in a city you could go in a fountain, or perhaps shoot on a train track. So, you can go very dark or really artistic. In any case, the message being created, using creative light, should be about the love between the bride and groom, and that this dress is that it’s not going to be worn again.


GOING TOO FAR?
There are really no limits to creativity when a photographer is working with clients that are willing to sacrifice the dress for the sake of making a killer image, but should there be?

There are the personal safety issues that go hand-in-hand with dropping into a dank cave, wading in a river, climbing tall trees or swimming with wild animals in an ocean that could be hundreds of feet deep. You put a bride in a wedding dress in the middle of the ocean, 100 feet deep, and who knows what might happen, so safety could be one of the limits, but there are no rules. For me, I don’t want there to be any limits or boundaries, because that’s the ultimate expression for this kind of session.

In my particular case the limit would be doing something that is not flattering to the bride, stay close to the meaning of ‘we are just married and we are starting a new life together.’ It depends on what my clients like to some extent, but they are choosing me because they are seeing in my portfolio what they want to have.