Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Promising Images (Promising Images of Love. The Mediatisation of Values and Norms in Religious and Secular Wedding Narratives)
Reporting period: 2022-03-01 to 2024-02-29
Digital and electronic media are pivotal in wedding rituals, whether it's during the preparation, the ceremony itself, or afterward. Wedding photographers orchestrate the couple's moments during the ceremony and reception. These portrayals influence the memories of the wedding couple and their guests in the future. Weddings are understood as a constitutive rite de passage that is commonly practiced in religious traditions as well as in a variety of cultural and secular contexts. Wedding practices shape and communicate the gender, social, cultural and economic norms and values of individuals and groups. The project scrutinizes how media representations and practices enclose and reshape religious and secular norms and values as well as stereotypes. This interdisciplinary study draws on theories from the study of religion, cultural studies, media ethics and applies a multi-methodological approach. The field work includes participatory observation, the analysis of wedding shows, and narrative-biographical video recorded interviews with 27 married couples in Switzerland, Italy and Germany. The research increases social awareness of the power of images (that express hierarchical relationships among individuals, genders and in religions), in order to strengthen a more inclusive, secure, innovative, and reflective European society and culture, to improve respect and to prevent subordination. The aim of the research is: (1) To understand how media transform religious and secular institutions like churches, civil registry offices, wedding photographers, and commercial service providers. The following multimedia presentation presents the different institutions involved in weddings: (2 To analyse the role of photos and videos to remember the wedding day, specifically the religious and secular ceremony. The question of gender is addressed as an analytical framework. Building on the mediatisiation of weddings, the third research goal (3) considers the norms and values expressed in the dynamic among the ceremony location, the couple getting married, and their guests referred to as “locationship”.
The research concludes that the mediatisation of weddings blends the religious with the secular sphere. Wedding media practices strengthen the feeling of belonging to a community that transcends cultural-religious identities. In the production, taking photos and videos becomes part of the religious and secular rite of passage’s collective memory that connects the individual couples. In the reception the memory of the wedding is homogenised through the representational norms of the wedding photos. The representational norms of wedding photos highlight the triangle between the couple, their guests, and the location, the so called "locationship". In this triangle religious and secular norms and values are further blended.
The research concludes that the mediatisation of weddings blends the religious with the secular sphere. Wedding media practices strengthen the feeling of belonging to a community that transcends cultural-religious identities. In the production, taking photos and videos becomes part of the religious and secular rite of passage’s collective memory that connects the individual couples. In the reception the memory of the wedding is homogenised through the representational norms of the wedding photos. The representational norms of wedding photos highlight the triangle between the couple, their guests, and the location, the so called "locationship". In this triangle religious and secular norms and values are further blended.
The research yielded results in two areas. The first area applies an ethnographic-analytical approach that focuses on the mediatisation and memory of weddings. The study shows that taking photos during the wedding becomes an important part of the ritual, independent of any cultural or religious background, gender, and sexual orientation. The ceremony itself is emphasized in the photos and the video. This homogenisation of the rite of passage equally occurs in the photographic representations of weddings and in turn influences how the wedding is remembered. The findings further reveal that heterosexual marriage representations reinforce gender stereotypes. The brides/wives of heterosexual couples are significantly more invested in the production and reception of wedding media, whereas homosexual couples participated in the conversation equally.
The second area concerns ethical questions regarding the mediatisation of weddings and how stylistic norms of wedding photography express, affirm, adapt, and reshape religious and secular values. It could be shown that norms and values originating from wedding photography of religious ceremonies continue to influence secular norms and values. It is particularly striking that religion is used in wedding photos as an aesthetic norm, a "visual enchantment", independently of whether it concerns a religious or a secular wedding.
The research with the rich audiovisual data corpus is exploited in different academic publications. A non-fiction book for a broader audience presents a diverse and critical view on weddings in a historical and contemporary perspective. Also based on the results of the research best practices have been formulated. They intend to provide an impetus to design wedding images more consciously in order to question existing patterns of representation in relation to gender norms and existing values and to think differently. It is aimed at photographers and wedding couples. See Mäder, M.-T. (2024). Best Practices for Wedding Photographers and Videographers. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10903461. The website of the project presents the results of the research in blogs and articles with rich photo materials from the field work. The research has been presented at conferences and public lectures and included in seminaries and workshops. Additionally, it has been disseminated in science to public activities about ethics, gender, media, and religion in television, radio, and magazines.
The second area concerns ethical questions regarding the mediatisation of weddings and how stylistic norms of wedding photography express, affirm, adapt, and reshape religious and secular values. It could be shown that norms and values originating from wedding photography of religious ceremonies continue to influence secular norms and values. It is particularly striking that religion is used in wedding photos as an aesthetic norm, a "visual enchantment", independently of whether it concerns a religious or a secular wedding.
The research with the rich audiovisual data corpus is exploited in different academic publications. A non-fiction book for a broader audience presents a diverse and critical view on weddings in a historical and contemporary perspective. Also based on the results of the research best practices have been formulated. They intend to provide an impetus to design wedding images more consciously in order to question existing patterns of representation in relation to gender norms and existing values and to think differently. It is aimed at photographers and wedding couples. See Mäder, M.-T. (2024). Best Practices for Wedding Photographers and Videographers. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10903461. The website of the project presents the results of the research in blogs and articles with rich photo materials from the field work. The research has been presented at conferences and public lectures and included in seminaries and workshops. Additionally, it has been disseminated in science to public activities about ethics, gender, media, and religion in television, radio, and magazines.
Closing the research gap in media ethics by studying the mediatisation of weddings progresses beyond the state of art on eight different levels: (1) On a methodological level the basic interdisciplinary research with the camera in the field in three European countries is combined with media ethical considerations. It is a novel way to investigate norms and values produced by the media. (2) By considering norms and values of wedding photos, it could be shown that cultural-religious differences are blurred in the mediatisation of weddings. (3) On a theoretical level a media ethics model that systematizes wedding media has been developed. It expands the spaces of production, representation, reception, and distribution of wedding media with media ethical questions. (4) The research deduced from its findings best practices for photographers and wedding couples that can be applied in weddings. (5) The research influences public debates about religion and a secular society. Additionally, and specifically with regard to gender, representations of religion and the secular sphere in the media are based on societal norms and moral judgements of the social actors involved. By making norms and judgments explicit, the research enhances equality and critical thinking in society in an innovative manner. (6) By considering processes of representation of religion and the secular sphere the research extends existing political and social debates in new and original ways to the ethical perspective of “what kind of society we are building”. (7) Media distribution, such as wedding photography and videos on the internet and in the press, change one’s views on what constitutes “public” and “private” spaces of religious and secular spheres. The project provides original insights that question the supposed privatisation of religion and the secularisation of society. (8) It elaborates a first approach to a systematic analysis of the basic categories of values and norms by applying an interdisciplinary perspective working with a mix of disciplines.