Features of Photo and Video Shooting in Traditional and Modern Weddings and Innovative-Technological Formats of Holding Wedding Ceremonies

Author

Bekh Kateryna

a junior research fellow at the Ukrainian Ethnological Centre Department of the M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the NAS of Ukraine 

Features of Photo and Video Shooting in Traditional and Modern Weddings and Innovative-Technological Formats of Holding Wedding Ceremonies

Abstract

One of the main sources for writing such works is the text and audio recording of information from participants and eyewitnesses of wedding ceremony. As technology advances, new means of preserving and reproducing historical reality have emerged: photography and video recordings. Photographs and videos as sources attract the scientific attention of ethnologists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and culturologists.

Since the late XIXth century, technical development has allowed ethnographers, in addition to drawings, sketches and diagrams, to take photographs, and later – videos. At the same time, specimens from family archives constitute a larger array of researchers researchers’ visual and audio-visual source bases. Besides ordinary everyday domestic portrait and landscape photography, the earliest photos with documentary and scientific contents have appeared. As for the time of wedding photography appearance, it is believed that it coincides with the emergence and spread of photography in general.

By the mid-XXth century, brides had been photographed in studios, as the equipment was cumbersome and nonportable, while the filming process was lengthy. Photographs had a portrait nature, the posing of the married couples was limited to one or two strict poses. The development of wedding photography has entered a new phase after the Second World War, when a new concept of shooting the events of the whole wedding day appeared.

During the period of active introduction of Soviet rituals, the presence of a photographer during the marriage registration became commonplace. Since the 1990s, video shooting with a portable videocassette camcorder had become popular at weddings in parallel with reportage and staged photographies. Initially, the filming of a wedding day was carried out in fragments, in a short-length format. Along with the change in photography formats, new variations of video shooting have emerged. For the most part, this is a short film on the history of dating and relationships of the newly married couple. Families of the latter try to reproduce the traditional customs known to them and typical of their places of residence, namely clothes, attributes, verbal formulae, and wedding gifts.

It is noteworthy that in the age of digital technologies, wedding photos and videos have become available to the general public, namely to Internet users. Modern newly married couples are active participants of social networks and communities and often publish their wedding photos and clips in galleries on their virtual pages, individual thematic sitesб or blogs.

Among young people, such wedding video streams become increasingly popular, so it is not inconceivable that as time goes by, such broadcasts will naturally form a new custom of modern weddings.

Keywords

photography, video recording, photo-report, photo album, video broadcast, online wedding.

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