Photo © Oksana Veniaminova
Portrait - NOMINEE: Oksana Veniaminova
White Dress
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Marriage is a kind of greatest concerns for many women of different ages in my country.The popular belief endows the wedding gown with a mystical power to preserve happy and the only marriage forever. So the tradition prescribes keeping the gown in order to save the matrimony. Sometimes at any cost.
After preserving their dresses carefully and superstitiously for decades, it gets very important to fit them again. Even if it is tight and awkward.
In most cases women keep their wedding gowns as a memory and just sometimes in virtue of utility. My characters' childhood moments are featured by their moms' and grannies' wedding gowns. Those memories are full in glamour, magic and beauty. Also, there sound their grannies' words of keeping the dress and bridal veil at home without carrying them out, not showing to anybody and not letting anybody to have them. That is the precondition for strong and forever marriage. The tradition arrives as prejudice and superstitions. For example, the veil has a very special significance, serves as an amulet and is believed to be able to calm down an uneasily sleeping infant. Also it's not uncommon, that women continue keeping their gowns even after divorce.
Replication of prior experience is a main feature of memory. So, my characters' young daughters already tend towards wearing their moms' wedding gowns during the ceremony. A white dress turns into a self-replicating pattern. Their grannies' message integrates into a women's collective memory.
The articles of the wedding gown, being endowed with power and symbols, become fetish. While I come across with it, the modernity is starting to fall apart.
Some women go on keeping their dresses due to some unconscious reasons they are not able to voice. The real or imaginary value of those things is so great but the event related to them is of such importance that sometimes it seems to me that the memory of it substitutes life itself. Everything can be dramatically different here and now. But women keep turning mentally and ritually to that important day by keeping and wearing those dresses for anniversaries.
About author:
Oksana Veniaminova
1986 - born in Vitebsk, Belarus
2014-2015 – attended school of portrait and analogue photography in Minsk, Belarus.
2016-2018 - studying documentary photography at St.Petersburg school of photojournalism and contemporary photography DocDocDoc.
Publications:
The Washington Post
The Calvert Journal
Bird In Flight
Afisha Daily
Imena magazine
The Guardian
frankie magazine (Australia)
Awards
2017 HELLERAU PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD, nominee
2018 Kolga Photo Award, shortlisted
Exhibitions
2018 HELLERAU PORTRAITS EXHIBITION, Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden, Germany
Riga Photomonth 2018
Kolga Tbilisi Photo 2018, Georgia
2018 Non-fashion exhibition, Minsk, Belarus
2019 Genitive exhibition, Minsk, Belarus
Riga Photomonth 2019
After preserving their dresses carefully and superstitiously for decades, it gets very important to fit them again. Even if it is tight and awkward.
In most cases women keep their wedding gowns as a memory and just sometimes in virtue of utility. My characters' childhood moments are featured by their moms' and grannies' wedding gowns. Those memories are full in glamour, magic and beauty. Also, there sound their grannies' words of keeping the dress and bridal veil at home without carrying them out, not showing to anybody and not letting anybody to have them. That is the precondition for strong and forever marriage. The tradition arrives as prejudice and superstitions. For example, the veil has a very special significance, serves as an amulet and is believed to be able to calm down an uneasily sleeping infant. Also it's not uncommon, that women continue keeping their gowns even after divorce.
Replication of prior experience is a main feature of memory. So, my characters' young daughters already tend towards wearing their moms' wedding gowns during the ceremony. A white dress turns into a self-replicating pattern. Their grannies' message integrates into a women's collective memory.
The articles of the wedding gown, being endowed with power and symbols, become fetish. While I come across with it, the modernity is starting to fall apart.
Some women go on keeping their dresses due to some unconscious reasons they are not able to voice. The real or imaginary value of those things is so great but the event related to them is of such importance that sometimes it seems to me that the memory of it substitutes life itself. Everything can be dramatically different here and now. But women keep turning mentally and ritually to that important day by keeping and wearing those dresses for anniversaries.
About author:
Oksana Veniaminova
1986 - born in Vitebsk, Belarus
2014-2015 – attended school of portrait and analogue photography in Minsk, Belarus.
2016-2018 - studying documentary photography at St.Petersburg school of photojournalism and contemporary photography DocDocDoc.
Publications:
The Washington Post
The Calvert Journal
Bird In Flight
Afisha Daily
Imena magazine
The Guardian
frankie magazine (Australia)
Awards
2017 HELLERAU PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD, nominee
2018 Kolga Photo Award, shortlisted
Exhibitions
2018 HELLERAU PORTRAITS EXHIBITION, Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden, Germany
Riga Photomonth 2018
Kolga Tbilisi Photo 2018, Georgia
2018 Non-fashion exhibition, Minsk, Belarus
2019 Genitive exhibition, Minsk, Belarus
Riga Photomonth 2019