2025

'Til Death Do Us Part

A wedding album for a wedding that never was. In these self-portraits, I am both bride and witness, digitally cloaked in a gown to confront the space between grief's private reality and the cultural performance of love.

‘Til Death Do Us Part
2025
Digital composite

At 30, I watch my friends marry while my partner is dead. Cancer took him before we could wed, exiling me from futures we’d imagined. These images emerge from that absence. Shot alone in my Southern Italy hotel room with a small tripod and camera, I recorded video of myself and extracted stills. The makeshift methodology mirrors grief’s improvisation: you do what you can with what you have when what you need is impossible. I’ve digitally added the wedding dress to these extracted frames. A wedding dress as real as any wedding photography, in all of its performance, construction, agreed-upon fiction we treat as truth.
The dress I’m wearing represents my childhood fantasy, the one I imagined wearing since girlhood when marriage seemed like an inevitable happy ending. Growing up in an Italian-Australian family, this dream carried particular weight: weddings as cultural cornerstone, marriage as measure of adult success. This project marks the first time I've seen myself as a bride, even artificially. A milestone I'll never reach in this lifetime with the person I loved most.
My self-portraits expose grief’s exhausting logistics. This includes the ‘going-through-motions’ quality, the apathy beneath the bride costume. Here I am the photographer, subject, bride, widow and mourner simultaneously, performing the multiple roles like grief demands of me. Just as I fronted normalcy throughout my partner’s illness and after his death, these images make visible how grief requires performing stability – getting dressed, executing rituals, pretending futures exist – while knowing it’s constructed, artificial, as fake as the digitally-added dress. Being both behind and in front of the camera literalises the isolation. I’m my own witness to ceremonies that require witnesses, my own photographer for wedding photos that document nothing real, my own audience for performances staged in empty rooms.
Beyond personal loss, I offer an investigation of the gap between a wedding’s cultural performance and grief’s private reality. Social media saturates us with perfect wedding imagery, with its curated joy, flawless ceremonies, love documented and validated. But it’s not just social media. It’s societal pressure to marry by a certain age, have children, settle down according to prescribed timeline. What happens when that perfect narrative shatters? What about the performance inherent in marriage itself? How many truly last? How many people actually marry their ultimate love?
Italy grounds this work in specific loss. This is my heritage. I never got to introduce my partner to my motherland. Ironically, Italy is also a quintessential marriage photography location – proposals on coastlines, ceremonies in gardens, anniversary trips through ancient cities. I'm performing wedding photographs in the exact landscape where weddings get photographed, revealing both my specific grief and the broader constructed-ness of how we document love, commitment, and futures we imagine will unfold as planned – grounded in somewhere so deeply personal to my identity.
So here is my wedding album, as the bride who photographed her own wedding because there was no wedding to photograph.

‘TIL DEATH DO US PART

2025

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