Wedding Talk on NPR

Talk of the Nation had an interesting segment yesterday about weddings.

Toward the end there's an interview with Mark Eric founder of www.trashthedress.com about Trash the Dress sessions post wedding. This has been getting a lot of attention lately, having been on Good Morning America and other local and national news sources.

Hear the NPR segment here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2007/06/mawidge_1.html

Trashing the dress is actually more of a buzzword than the reality. Most dresses do survive the sessions quite well, and after being cleaned one wouldn't even know that they had been subjected to sometimes extreme situations.

There are two schools of thought among photographers about trash the dress images.
One set wants to see the dress become as trashed as possible, if the dress doesn't get extremely dirty (and often the bride as well), it doesn't qualify for them as a trash the dress session.

The other side of the fence (where we land on the issue) is looking to create artistic and beautiful images that can be preserved for generations. We like to do this after the wedding, so there is less worry if things get a little dirty. Because we are searching for beauty in these sessions, we have dropped the "trash the dress" termanology as we feel it doesn't communicate to our clients our goal and methods. We simply call these our "Afterwards" sessions.

In bygone years, it was much more common for a daughter to wear her mother's wedding dress. That rarely happens these days, and often the dreses are simply boxed up and stored away with no future purpose.

We feel that it is much better to risk a little dirt and have images and memories that can be displayed and treasured--after all--the real memories to be treasured are not of the dress itself, but of the experience of wearing the dress.