Weddingbee

I get to do a trash the dress session with videography greats Still-Motion. When I think about local Vancouver spots for a trash the dress session, nothing really appeals to me in the same way that I was really bored with the overdone hotels and golf courses as reception venues. I love edgy photos which is why I drool over anything taken with a lomo and/or cross processed (here’s a sample of cross processed images on flickr). My photography heroes used to be Heather Champ, delicious blur, and quarlo, back in the day when I took more photos.

If I could have my reception in an abandoned warehouse I would be the happiest girl in the world! So on this dirty note, let’s talk about trashing the dress….

To me, East Hastings is an inextricable part of my Vancouver. I took these photos years back with the squatters outside the old Woodwards building, but if you’re unfamiliar with the area, it’s shocking but certainly not out of place.

I went down to Hastings and Main in this area for about three years, spending 6-7 hours of my Friday night serving food or singing worship songs at a small, upstairs place next to the Balmoral Hotel street church. Now it seems so far away, and so far removed from my life. I went back one Christmas to revisit the smell of coffee mixed with hot dogs, mixed with an endless line of unwashed men and felt like I was perhaps the only one I knew who understood how I felt about it.

Here’s some photos I’ve gathered off of flickr. You’ll see it really is skid row, and I think it’s one of the worst places in North America. But it’s safe. It’s so safe. Canadians don’t carry guns, eh? And I used to leave street church at 1am.

Anyone in the northwest is probably familiar with the Pickton serial murderer - a pig farmer who abducted and murdered anywhere from 26 to 60 some odd women, and literally fed them to his pigs. In that sense, my fiance is very uncomfortable with the idea of doing a TTD session there - it just seems too much like a slap in the face to the people in the area to have someone parading around in a $1000-5000 dress I guess. It’s hard to explain.

I read about a trash the dress session where a “daring” bride/model posed on an alley mattress and it reminded me of hastings and main. I used to want to take portraits of the people there because there was so much story in each of their faces. Give them a meal in exchange for a portrait. But I literally lacked the balls to do it being small, dainty, and female amongst a throng of drunken men and drugged up prostitutes.  So this area for a TTD was just an idea.  I’ve looked into other potential sites that I’ll post about later.

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