Novias

NOVIAS

started many years ago with a Texas Monthly photo story I suggested exploring the wedding shops on Avenue Lerdo in Ciudad Juerez across the Rio Grande from El Paso - a bedraggled, gap-toothed street peddling bridal fantasies. By the time the shoot was finished, Texas Monthly was sold, the story was dropped, and the border, well, it isn't the shopping paradise it once was.

Over the years the NOVIAS project took on many different forms: an edition of prints encased in a memory box, found scrapbooks with dried floral arrangements, large glass-plate vintage negatives, wedding gowns posed as silent sentinels, a video documenting garden bridal shoots, and, finally, enlarged close-ups of wedding dresses printed on archival re-adhesion photo paper.

Samples of all these pieces are included in this book.

What was a celebration of a ceremony is now a ceremony of a celebration.