The implications of that transformation are far reaching. What I wanted to get at was that you don’t just get married: When you get married, people will think of you as “married,” as, in some important sense, a different person, or a different kind of person, than you were before. I was interested in the point of intersection between religion and ideas about what it means to be married. These days, brides who make traditional vows consciously decide whether to promise to obey, as well as love and honor, their husbands. If they don’t take “obey” out, it will be in there. It could, after all, be the other way around, “obey” being left out unless someone asked for it to be included. Tradition thus subtly counsels “obey.” But now brides consider the question. I used the bride’s pause at the church door to suggest a hesitation, a conscious stopping to think about these conflicting feelings, values, and desires. She hears in her head the voices of other people, of institutions. She carries on an internal dialogue with these voices. We understand her situation only when we understand these other relationships and considerations. To get at this idea, to suggest some of these other voices, I put the photograph in the context of the other photographs in the essay.

In the photograph I made at the Josephinium birthday party, the white dress is smeared on the film, an unfocused, insubstantial form. The bridal dress from the Central Lutheran wedding was not photographed that way. Instead, that image describes the dress in sharply focused detail meant to induce a meditation on the gown itself — the sensuous satin, the way it falls and folds and reflects the light, all those covered buttons. By containing the dress and making it — not the bride — dominant in the frame, I intended viewers to pause, to study it, and to think of it in the context of the white dresses and white robes in other pictures.

The white dress came to symbolize for me the definitions women do battle with, the molds they have to fit into or resist, all the obligations that come with the definitions of gender current in American society. Of course, not everyone does battle with these