religion, situations that expressed ideas about a woman’s role and place. I photographed a wedding at the Central Lutheran Church (fig. 44). The bride stands before the open door in her beautiful, white bridal dress, pausing as she is about to enter the church and walk down the aisle and be married.(19) As a bride, even if you don’t accept the system of beliefs and practices symbolized by that white dress, you’re forced to deal with it because it’s so integrated into Western culture.

Earlier in the project, I’d made a photograph in a meeting room of a Nazarene Church that contains a podium, a portrait of Jesus on a wall, a flag, a plant, and a chalk board on an easel on which someone had written “Kevin Loves Brenda & it = True Love” (fig. 28). I thought the statement was funny, obviously a prank. But, placed where it was, it posed questions about religion and “true love.” What constitutes true love? Which of our desires and ideals are learned? When someone decides to marry, what expectations does that create, especially for a bride?

I was thinking of that photograph, and the things it had suggested to me, when I photographed the wedding at Central Lutheran Church. I knew I didn’t want to photograph the woman actually getting married, the ceremony itself. I wanted to photograph her as she waited to walk down the aisle, her pause at the door, or at least the pictorial suggestion of a pause, because I had some ideas about that pause, independent of what her own thoughts might have been.

For me, the pause symbolizes taking stock, thinking about what’s at stake in this action. It’s not necessarily a hesitation, although it could be that. I was using this picture not to document the fact of a particular wedding but for my own purpose, which was to question some deeply embedded cultural perspectives about women. People negotiate their lives within these larger social forms, and how they deal with these things had become interesting to me. At the end of the aisle is the altar where this woman will be transformed into a wife.