Wedding pictures

If you drive around Hanoi on a sunny Sunday, you see couples in wedding dress everywhere, nervously posing for professional photographers armed with spotlights, screens and assistants. As Hanoi is a virtually parkless city, any available patch of green is used. On some popular places, such as Hoan Kiem Lake or the Red River beach, you can see numerous posing couples, just a few metres apart from each other. Even the narrow strip of grass on the west side of Kim Ma street is a popular location - sad evidence of the scarcity of green in this city.

In present-day Vietnam, weddings are ubiquitous. Everbody seems to be getting married, constantly, and everybody wants to show off. It is a trend that can easily be explained by referring to demographic and economic developments: the Vietnamese baby boom was in the eighties, after all, and many people have now reached the age where they get married - en masse. Besides, weddings are big business. That is, as the urban middle class is willing to spend impressive amounts of their newly earned money on it, they have become important status symbols. One consequence is that a professional photo shoot has become pretty much obligatory, if you don't want your neighbours to look down upon you.

Oddly, wedding pictures in this country are not made during weddings, but weeks or even months in advance. Apparently this is because it enables couples to use the results of their photo shoot for a slide show that can be projected during the actual wedding. Thus, the couples you see posing everywhere in the city are not married yet. In fact, more often than not they are so early that their wedding clothes are not made yet, which means they usually wear hired wedding dresses.

I have seen some of the results of such 'professional' wedding photo shoots. Frankly, I did not like them. Photoshopping had made people look unnaturally white, tacky English phrases ('TRUE LOVE FOREVER') were printed on the background, kitschy purikura-style frames were added, and, most importantly, many of the poses were completely unnatural. Accordingly, I wasn't very excited about getting such a photo shoot myself.

But when in Rome, do as the Romans. Although Nhung, my fiancée, understood and shared my opinion on Vietnamese wedding picture trends, she did want to have some nice pictures of the two of us. She managed to convince me that it would be practical to have pictures taken before the actual wedding, and, in any case, that it would be nice to finally have some really good pictures of us together. She was right.

We were lucky. A friend of mine, David, is a great photographer, and he kindly agreed to take our pictures. He did a great job, and we are very happy with the results. Another friend, Hien, helped us a lot by doing Nhung's make-up. Many thanks to both of them!

This is a small selection. More pictures can be found on facebook.