| 'Trashion' trend |
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| Local Content |
| Written by Robin |
| Wednesday, 21 January 2009 10:25 |
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By Sharon Ulrich Sun Times Kristy Hartt’s wedding was picture perfect. From photos of her brother’s radiating smile to a tear welling in her mother’s eye, or her niece licking icing off the wedding cake with eyes peering to the side to see if anyone was watching, the Hartt’s wedding album is “like a trip down memory lane in vivid colour.” “He captured every moment I wanted captured throughout our wedding day,” she says of photographer Mark Pawlyszyn. “And that was just one of the most beneficial things to me because then I can look at these pictures and you really remember what you were feeling at that very moment. You can see it in the pictures.” But among dreams of one day modelling her wedding gown melded with letting the fun, sporty side of her nature out, Hartt joined the growing number of women who choose to trash the dress, a movement in photography in which newly married women don their wedding duds days or weeks after the nuptials and have pictures taken in unexpected places. While some photo shoots entail the bride slinging mud or having her dress set on fire, Hartt had no reason to ruin her gown and opted to snowboard the Sugar Bowl instead. “I absolutely love my wedding dress and I didn’t want to ‘trash it,’ so that’s why I just thought with something like this it would be fun. I didn’t trash my dress at all. I got it a little bit wet in the back, but it was just a chance to have just a different shot in your dress without doing the traditional trashing it or jumping in the lake or something like that with it.” As a photographer, Pawlyszyn of Unique Images Photography bears no liking for the phrase, “trash the dress,” either. Instead of destrying a wedding dress — the most extravagant, expensive article of clothing a woman will ever buy to wear for a single day — he prefers to return to what he calls “romantic fashion shoots.” “It’s an opportunity for creation of something that is beyond the boundaries of what you can do on a structured wedding day,” he says. Alluding to movies of old where the guy gets the girl and the last scene pans over them rolling on the beach, waves crashing over them, for Pawlyszyn, the latest trend in wedding photography brings romanticism, and inspiration. “Even something a little more modern like Bridget Jones’ Diary and at the end she’s running through the snow and she’s in her underwear, right, and it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care. All that matters is her love to this guy, and that’s the romance aspect of it. So you capture photos that show their love and you use the environment against them in a way. You’re showing their love is powerful enough to overcome the elements.” Pawlyszyn works with his surroundings, capturing the innocence of a bride sitting in a farmer’s field after climbing through a barbed wire fence, or a bare patch of ground on the outskirts of Edmonton ignited with petrol, bride and groom surrounded by a ring of fire shaped like a heart. Yet, from tender exchanges shared only by the bride and groom, at other times, brides such as Hartt venture out on their own after the wedding. Pawlyszyn recalls Trina Lewis wanted to capture a moment she’d never forget on her anniversary. Without any real plans for the shoot, it turns out an award-winning photo magnificently captured Lewis, dressed in her wedding gown, half-submerged in darkened water, droplets of water frozen in time, arched above her. Photographers globally tried to capture the same shot, which flattered Pawlyszyn. But for what turned out to be Lewis’s favourite shot, Pawlyszyn recalls she needed a little coaxing, as he himself took to the water, submerged to his neck to get the right perspective. “She was about to do this little hop off the pier and I said, ‘no, no jump in, take a running jump.’ And so she did. It’s funny actually. The look on her face was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this, but it’s fun.’ That probably sums it up for a lot of brides. I don’t think you’d get many brides doing it, that don’t have a sense of fun.” For Hartt, the photographs show the sporty, fun side of her personality, stepping outside the confines of tradition. Immersed in a different atmosphere, she refers to a particular shot of herself in a tunnel within the city’s limits. “It somewhat looks like a model pose and yet it’s still you and it’s your dress and it just makes me feel very glamorous and very elegant. It’s almost like the pictures you see in a magazine and it’s just really nice that there’s women out there who can just have a chance to go and do that again and have another picture to keep and have another memory.” |
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