Wedding Picture
2019

digital photography, superimposition
variable measurements


This piece was created during the dissolution of my parents marriage after 27 years. As a mixed-race child, my sight has always been dichotomised, my artistic and theoretical development always invested in opposition. Their wedding picture, meant as a symbol of blending families, served throughout the years to emphasise what proved to be irreconciliable in their personal and cultural histories. Yet three ‘reconciliations’ were produced during that time: my two sisters and I. This project was an indignant desire to present the fact of myself to my parents during an acrimonious period in our family history, as well as search for recognition: in their respective youths, in the hope made manifest, the pictures they took of each other, the ways they saw each other, in the reasoning before setting out on the doomed mission of a marriage.

I drew conceptual inspiration from the poem ‘I Go Back to May 1937’ by Sharon Olds, below.




“...I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”

-Sharon Olds, ‘I Go Back to May 1937,’ excerpt.
Hasadri Freeman © 2025