Posted on 06/11/2006 3:14:42 AM PDT by MadIvan
WEDDING photography, once a restrained art, is becoming a risqué business. A growing number of American brides are marking their big day by commissioning portraits of themselves in raunchy poses and lingerie, writes John Harlow.
This month, when a quarter of America’s annual 2m weddings take place, brides’ parents are paying up to £6,000 for an “action photographer”, whose brief is to capture their daughter “accidentally” exposing sexy garters or her knickers.
The American wedding is changing fast. Traditionalists have already lamented a switch to homemade vows, such as “to stay together so long as we make each other laugh”, and a large-scale abandonment of white since Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of Sex and the City, got married in black.
The paparazzi-style wedding photographs are the latest shock to the establishment, although some clerics are going along with it.
Frank Ray, a Baptist minister in Tennessee, was the target of outrage when his bride published nuptial snaps of herself and her maids of honour dressed in plunging black leather bustiers on the internet. “It was fabulous fun, and something we shall always remember,” said the 58-year-old minister.
Wedding photographers say such pictures are becoming the rage across all sections of US society. Steven Gross, a Chicago photographer, said he had taken nearly 8,000 shots at a recent £100,000 wedding, but the most prominent one in the album was a close-up of bridal cleavage.
“Brides, and sometimes the groom, want to show off their gym-fit bodies,” said a spokesman for Equinox, a gym chain that offers a “wedding boot camp”.
Richard Albans, a photographer in Los Angeles, turned to wedding work after being punched by a Hollywood bodyguard.
“But I did not realise what today’s bride really wants: a true evocation of that moment when she was at her most sexually and socially powerful,” he said.
“She wants to remind her spouse why he married her. It was not just because she looked radiant in white — underneath she was downright dirty and dangerous in a black garter or red-sequinned bra.
“It’s more Las Vegas showgirl than blushing bride.”
One of his clients, who is marrying later this year, said she was planning on opening the doors to her bridal boudoir for three days before the main event. “I want a big book of photographs, showing everything from me flashing my boobs as I get dressed to my boyfriend having his chest waxed,” she said.
“It’s about intimacy, the real story, as well as silly fun.”
makes me glad I alrady got my bride and don't have to worry until my sons get married.
"Is the photog going to video the wedding night too? That's the logical consumation of the trend"
Do you mean marriage porn?
There are those people out there, I have met them.
I saw a television thing where this guy was set up on his birthday by a radio station, where they brought him into the studio, blindfolded him, and told him he was going to get a free lap dance from a stripper.
They then brought his MOTHER in, and had him, blindfolded, feel her body with his hand and then to comment how he liked her. When they took off his blindfold, the poor guy nearly had a nervous breakdown.
I thought it was really mean spirited and low class as well. I was shocked this woman would even agree to do something like that to her son. So yeah, twisted people like that are out there.
I always thought she was way too ugly to get where she got on acting ability alone.
< ];^)
After reading that exchange, hopefully the groom RAN, not walked, away from that pending marriage.
Hostages. Hey, Michael Medved, if you should hap on this .... note the psychology involved. That one photo is a textbook of a deep case study.
So Paris Hilton was just doing wedding videos?
Who's the babe on the right?
If that's the only reason he married you, honey, then you're in for a world of disappointment.
Any man who shaves his legs and gets his chest waxed isn't a man in my book. I like a real man, with a little hair in the appropriate places.
So the metrosexual fad lives on in the U.S.? I wish it would hurry up and go the way of the 8-track player.
I call BS.
NO Baptist Minister from Tennessee would EVER say those words!
The kind that gave "princess" anything and everything she ever wanted in life.
Perhaps Sarah was simply trying to kill two birds with one stone and get the imminant divorce rolling at the same time in the interests of efficiency.
ROTFLMAO!
Ping for later read...
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