Prenuptial boudoir photos are so... two weeks ago — the new hot trend in wedding photography, according to the New York Daily News, is "sexy" photos taken of the happy couple on the morning after their wedding night. For these morning-after photo shoots, the wedding photographer comes into the pair's home, honeymoon suite, or wherever they spent their first night together as a married couple to capture the rumpled, unmade bed, and the bride and groom in various stages of intimacy and undress. Not everyone in the wedding industry thinks these post-consummation photos are necessary, or even tasteful — the trend is "a little bizarre," Candy Cantor of New York City's RK Bridal tells the Daily News. "I am far from a prude," but "there's a sexiness to the wedding and I think that's enough." But plenty of couples disagree. Here's a look at this new way of documenting your love:
Why would anyone want morning-after photos?
The reasons vary. The wedding photographers who specialize in these shoots say the morning-after pictures celebrate the new bond formed between the couple. "The feeling I try to capture is closeness," says Detroit photographer Melissa Squires, 39. "That lovely calm and happiness one feels when they realize it's for real, now they are really husband and wife." Michelle Jonné, 34, a wedding photographer in New Jersey, mostly agrees, saying her motivation is documenting that marriage "is happy... it's sexy and it's not over." One of Jonné's clients, Iris Shamis, 38, is more practical: "When you get married, you're in the best shape of your life, and why not have these memories."
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Just how risqué are these photos?
It depends, obviously, on the comfort level of the couple — and the photographer. "We do it very sexy and implied," Jonné tells the Daily News. From the photos posted at her website, that means underwear-clad couples lying in unmade beds, half-dressed on the dining room table, standing with their pants around their ankles, or in the shower, back and hands pressed against the steamy glass door — you know, "like you saw in Titanic," says Caity Weaver at Gawker. Jonné charges $650 to document your first wedded morning.
Do couples plan on sharing the sexy pictures of themselves?
Of course — they're wedding pictures, after all. Shamis, who works in PR in New Jersey, posted the sexy photos from her shoot on Facebook and plans on showing her hypothetical children someday. "I wouldn't show this to them at the age of 10," she says. "But when they're older and can understand it. It's their parents looking artistic... not at all pornography." Right, "because, if there's one thing kids love to see, it's naked photos of their artistic parents making a 'shh!' sign," says Gawker's Weaver. Let's be realistic, though. The whole point of these snapshots is "to fool strangers into the believing you spent all night having sex," not passed out, too drunk or tired to consummate your marriage.
Is this healthy?
"It seems a little weirdly self-absorbed if you ask me," says Julie Gerstein at The Frisky, but apparently "couples love it," so who am I to judge? These photos could save your marriage, relationship expert Siggy Flicker tells ABC News. "I'm looking at two people the morning after their wedding, hugging or kissing — beautiful pictures expressing the way that they feel about each other," she says. "In a marriage, when things aren't going well, there's nothing better than taking out these pictures and saying look at the way we were. Let's get back to this place."
Does this say something larger about our society?
It's an "appalling" reflection of our over-sharing, celebrity-crazed culture, More magazine editor in chief Lesley Jane Seymour tells ABC News. "I think it's just an incredibly sad statement of, Is nothing private?... There's something wrong that people need all this public adulation." The even more perverse thing is that these kinds of intimate photos are what celebrities "hate about their lives," Seymour adds. "I can't understand why somebody wants to take the part celebrities hate and make it their lives."
Sources: ABC News, The Frisky, Gawker, New York Daily News
