Fashioning Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Transnational Gazes and the Production of Romance in Asian/American Bridal Photography

F h n n p l t n t z n h p: Tr n n t n lz nd th Pr d t n f R n n n r nBr d l Ph t r phNhi T. Lieu

Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 17, Number 2, June 2014,pp. 133-160 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/jaas.2014.0017

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Fashioning Cosmopolitan Citizenship

Transnational Gazes and the Production of

Romance in Asian/American Bridal Photography

nhi t. lieu

jaas june 2014 • 133–160© the johns hopkins university press

Part of a seventy-one-billion-dollar industry, wedding businesses thrive

even as the public continues to debate the viability of marriage while

facing uncertain economic times.1 The explosive rise of the wedding

culture in the twenty-first century, evidenced by popular bridal reality

television shows such as A Wedding Story, Bridezillas, and Say Yes to the

Dress (all airing and rerunning between 1996 and the present), urges

women to have ever more extravagant weddings, and many of them

acquiesce to those societal pressures. With dreamlike qualities, modern

weddings evoke romance, allure, fashion, style, and glamour. Even when

the intention is to achieve a modest style of simple elegance, it is not

uncommon to pay an outrageously high price tag—an average amount of

twenty-eight to thirty thousand dollars—in order for the bridal body to

become the site of lavish attention commanding gazes from near and far.2

Like most Americans, when a bride who identifies herself as Asian or

Asian American weds, she goes through this similarly extensive process

of imagining, planning, and realizing those costly romantic fantasies.3

Despite the rising social, cultural, and economic status of Asians in the

United States, the mainstream bridal market initially did not actively seek

to address their needs, nor did merchants realize that the multiple cultural

rites ethnic brides are expected to fulfill would yield such tremendous

profit. All this began to change by the early 1990s, owing largely to im-

migrant entrepreneurs from East Asia, mainly Hong Kong and Taiwan,

134 • JAAS • 17:2

who developed a niche market in the United States to provide a multitude

of services for those wishing to wed with ethnic and cultural flair.4 Small

bridal shops sprouted, giving rise to the informal but popularly known

destination called the “Asian Bridal District,” or, to insiders, “bridal row.”

With the congregation of the bridal business in one section of the South-

ern California suburb Temple City, it may appear as if owners made a

concerted effort to rebuild the bridal district as if it were elsewhere in

Asia. Nevertheless, the pattern of ethnic enclave formation indicates that

these shops coincidentally emerged as a result of immigrants imagining

these spaces as such. Consequently, resembling the famous bridal district

in Taiwan featured in Bonnie Adrian’s compelling study about gender and

Asian modernity, these shops make available a myriad of traditional ethnic

wedding attire and accessories from various Asian (mainly East Asian)

nations.5 The shops that line Temple City’s main street offer dreams and

fantasies with fashion and style makeovers, photography, videography,

attire rentals, and much more. For over two decades, Asian bridal shops,

owned and operated by mainly immigrant entrepreneurs and now their

children, have provided more than clothing that symbolizes culture and

ethnicity; they have also sold bourgeois images of wealth and fantasies of

romantic love in the form of hair and makeup makeovers for studio and

fashion photography. Getting married began to take on new meanings that

involved undergoing ethnic, aesthetic, and class transformations for both

bride and groom in an increasingly image-driven industry.

This article closely examines bridal makeovers, the visual produc-

tion of bodily transformations that take place with these practices, and

the documentation of these transformations through the aesthetics of

bridal photography. I situate these embodied practices at a juncture in

globalization in which transnational movements of people, culture, and

capital throughout the Pacific Rim are not unilateral but multilateral. In

particular, bridal photography performs three main intertwining func-

tions. First, as visual records, wedding photographs naturalize gender,

emphasizing the requisite youth and beauty of the bridal body. Second,

while the collection of photos often focuses on the performance of eth-

nicity, fashion photography taken prior to the actual wedding functions

simultaneously to demystify race. It does so by incorporating the subjects

135Fashioning Cosmopolitan Citizenship • lieu •

into narratives of heterosexual romance that deemphasize ethnic mark-

ers. Third, in creating these images, Asians and Asian Americans fashion

themselves as cosmopolitan, global bodies able to traverse class, race, and

nation through their participation in consumer capitalism. In theorizing

the affective techniques of racial representations in visual culture, Y. Anu

Saraswati argues that whiteness operates virtually and transnationally to

uphold a sense of cosmopolitanism.6 This concept of “cosmopolitan white-

ness” provides a helpful tool for thinking about the aspirational nature of

bridal photography as it visually secures Asian Americans as middle-class

subjects capable of navigating consumption and reproduction. Neverthe-

less, that the photographs may be open to multiple readings indicates that

cosmopolitan whiteness can never be complete in fulfilling the romance

of the subjects’ desired status.

My analysis builds on Bonnie Adrian’s brilliantly detailed ethno-

graphic study of Taiwan’s bridal industry. In Framing the Bride: Global-

izing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry, Adrian establishes

that as the Taiwanese people emerge onto the world stage they look to the

West for inspiration to construct themselves as modern subjects. While

Adrian’s work provides foundational analyses of the way gender and wed-

ding photography inform each other, my own research demonstrates that

immigrants from Asia and their children look to their homelands for what

they believe to be authentic expressions of culture. I suggest here that flows

of culture along with capital are multidirectional. Asian immigrants and

Asian Americans often look to Asia to authenticate an important event

in their lives—their wedding day. The wedding day represents not only

a rite of passage but also an event that compels those involved to seek

“tradition” and “culture.” This day marks an extension of filial obliga-

tions and as such encourages the performance of ethnicity. Documented

through the medium of photography, the marriage ceremony itself allows

a couple to enact cultural rites and empowers them to emerge as privileged

subjects of the state. Thus, they are not just performing “ethnicity” or

“authenticity,” they are performing citizenship as well. While some Asian

Americans blend and mix both “Western” and “Eastern” nuptial practices,

many—particularly brides—turn to the homeland in search of authentic-

ity. In fulfilling the wishes of their customers, the Asian immigrant bridal

136 • JAAS • 17:2

industry has correspondingly sought to look “back” to East and Southeast

Asia to reinforce this sense of “traditional” wedding practice. In what fol-

lows, I problematize the gaze between the West and the East as well as the

homeland and the diaspora by examining the embodied practice of bridal

photography to propose that technology enables the imagining of social

mobility while visual culture produces aspirational, romantic, and utopian

images of transcendence for Asians and Asian Americans.

Background and Methodology

I grew up in Southern California witnessing firsthand much of the early

development of the niche bridal industry. As members of my multiethnic

immigrant family married and participated in these cultural practices

on both the Chinese and Vietnamese sides, I collected memories often in

the form of visual representations of bridal bliss and beauty created by

my relatives in collaboration with the wedding experts. I saw the shops

grow, expand, and shrink according to supply, demand, fashion trends,

and economic imperatives. In the early 1990s, when the practice of bridal

photography began to gain in popularity, it was my parents’ generation

that fueled the businesses. Bridal photography was not only for young

couples starting a new life together. My parents, my aunts and uncles,

and a number of other immigrant couples in their circle of friends and

coworkers had their wedding photos taken in moderately sized bridal

photography studios. They cited a number of reasons for investing their

hard-earned money on having their wedding albums updated. Most often,

though, they wanted to create new memories of their day of matrimony

because (1) they were unable to afford studio pictures when they actually

got married, or their wedding photos were lost during their migration;

(2) they now were able to have new documentation of their special day

as a couple because wedding photos taken in the homeland often focused

on family and community, not necessarily the couple; or (3) they tacitly

understood that the actual commitment to taking these photos was akin

to renewing their vows. Despite having been married for years, many

wives were able to persuade their husbands to spend valuable time at a

photo studio. Given this rare opportunity to (re-)create their wedding

day through visual imagery, many couples participated—albeit under


the direction of the photographer—in producing an idealized version of

their romance through bridal photography. Although 35mm or 110 pho-

tographic film was the primary medium at this time, the married couples

eagerly underwent superficial transformations to produce new images of

their wedding day. New makeup techniques, filtered camera lenses, heavy

retouching, and photographic lighting allowed the couples, at the time in

their mid- to late thirties, to achieve a youthful appearance in the pictures.

The new wedding albums would be passed on to their friends and family

to see, their new images kept for generations to come.

As the first-generation immigrants have aged, the bridal photography

studios now offer “family portraits” that were rarely advertised when the

industry began to take off in the 1990s. The services are now aimed toward

their children and even grandchildren. While bridal row in Temple City

struggles during difficult economic times, it is currently undergoing a

revival due to the demand of the younger generation for more elaborate

weddings. A few of the studios have endured longer than others due to

reputation and quality. Others have closed permanently. This is a result of

both the economic downturn as well as the public outcry among citizens to

stop issuing business licenses to bridal shops and other racially motivated

incidents that occurred in the early 2000s.7

I gathered my data during two intensive weeks of observation and

oral history interviews with a handful of shop owners and photographers

in 2010, and I communicated with them via email. They also allowed me

to examine and analyze their photographs closely, as well as images they

posted on their company websites and social media. Some of the pho-

tographers and studio managers welcomed me as a researcher, revealing

their trials and tribulations working in a demanding industry, while others

refused to share their information and protected their privacy and that

of their business. Either way, the businesses welcomed anyone with an

engagement ring seeking to be transformed and immortalized through

the art of bridal photography.

historicizing the Bridal industry and the nuptials of asian aMericans

In her thorough study of the history of the bridal industry in the United

States, Vicki Howard found that it was not until the last quarter of the

138 • JAAS • 17:2

nineteenth century that weddings became a consumer-oriented institu-

tion. With a wealth of material evidence linking weddings to advertising

and consumer rites, Howard explains that the bridal industry increasingly

entered the mass market throughout the twentieth century. By the twenty-

first century, the niche bridal market had evolved into a multibillion-dollar

industry capitalizing on the long-standing desire for the “traditional

wedding.”8 Howard relies on Eric Hobsbawm’s classic formulation of

“invented traditions” to anchor her argument about the market’s creation

and sustenance of the notion of the “traditional wedding.”9 In the case

of the immigrants in my study, the enactment of “traditional” nuptials

stems from the simultaneous invention of new traditions as well as a

search for authenticity from the homeland that occurs both in memory

and in contemporaneous time. Other scholars such as Cele C. Otnes and

Elizabeth H. Pleck have shown that extravagant American weddings are a

direct result of the connection between ritual and consumption.10 Thus,

it is not surprising that multiple beneficiaries—both corporate and other

enterprising entities—are invested in the metastasizing of weddings. While

these notable studies of standard American wedding practices connect the

ritualistic and ceremonial to the mass market, few explore the important

role that ethnicity plays in matrimonial rituals or the relationship between

the commodification of ethnic identity and the dominant mass market.

My work locates immigrant Asian and Asian American matrimonial

practices amid larger narratives of globalization and migration as they

shape the formation of ethnic identity in the United States.11 Specifically,

I contend that market opportunities did not begin to be available until the

mid-1990s as globalization forces collided with technological advances in

photography and a heightened interest in wedding culture. The flowering

of the Pacific Rim economies instigated an increased flow of commodities

and images.12 Through popular culture such as magazines, satellite televi-

sion, video, and technological sources of information, exchanges between

individuals and families from Asia began circulating in the United States,

creating an aesthetic of ethnic difference that appealed to younger Asian

Americans. The acceptance of Asian chic in the American imagination

also enhanced the construction of “Asian cool” among youth. Images

generated from bridal photography reflected both Asian global moder-


nity and its transnational links to the diaspora and the homeland. The

professional photographer practicing her or his craft in the United States

often possessed either informal or formal training in Asian cultural and

aesthetic practices, yet that same photographer always displayed a keen

sense of awareness of American popular culture and the narratives those

images evoked in her or his work. Understanding the flow and circulation

of images between Asia and the United States enabled the conditions for

a successful career in bridal photography.

This highly glamorized form of bridal photography gained popularity

not because it replicated “Asian” glamour but because the images being

produced between the photographer and the couple aligned with the glo-

balization of American celebrity culture and the glamorization of celebrity

nuptials in the pages of star-focused fashion magazines such as InStyle. The

end product of the photography sessions was a colossal keepsake photo

album for the couple to keep for their home and a smaller sharing album

to be distributed among relatives, family members, and the couple’s social

circles. In the early 1990s, one trend that pervaded was the framing of the

bride or the couple within larger English text to look as if they were on the

cover of a magazine.13 It is now more common for the images to resemble

a slick, high-fashion photo spread. I offer close readings of this genre of

fashion bridal photography toward the end of the essay, but please refer

to Figure 1 as an example of how couples increasingly prefer to pose in

such images suggestive of a grander lifestyle.

The practice of image sharing coincided with the beginnings of

the proliferation of websites devoted to the bridal industry. Perhaps the

best-known company to rely on cyberspace for these potentially lucrative

exchanges was The Knot, an e-commerce-based start-up devoted to wed-

dings and all things bridal that catered to those seeking traditional and

nontraditional ways to “tie the knot.” An Asian American entrepreneur,

David Liu, and his Anglo-American wife, Carley Roney, started The Knot

when they noticed that the bridal industry at the time failed to accom-

modate couples that were entering a mix-raced, multicultural union like

themselves. In the midst of preparing for their nuptials, they noticed that

mainstream publications such as Brides and its sister publications Modern

Bride and Elegant Bride only advised women to plan for excessive and lush

140 • JAAS • 17:2

traditional weddings.14 Because the American bridal industry dictated

most wedding trends before the mid-1990s, anyone seeking simplicity or

alternative visions beyond the lavish would not find them. In her book The

Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel suggests that the postindustrial 1990s

gave rise to an aesthetic value that cultivated new tastes for design that

appealed to the senses. The new aesthetics, she explains, “shows rather than

tells, delights rather than instructs. The effects are immediate, perceptual,

and emotional. They are not cognitive, although we may analyze them

after the fact.”15 I trace the rise of The Knot brand and its current media

empire in connection with Asian American bridal photography and chang-

ing aesthetics of wedding practices in the 1990s because the company not

only played a key role in changing American perceptions about weddings,

but also facilitated new ways for ethnic and mixed couples to invent new

traditions in the United States.

With a winning formula for success, The Knot launched spin-off

websites devoted to a contemporary, modern lifestyle, such as The Nest

(home decorating) and The Bump (pregnancy and baby). In May 2011,

The Knot expanded its market overseas to China (Ijie.com), serving ten

Figure 1. Courtesy of Henry Wang Photography.


million couples seeking to wed with over six hundred local vendors and

an online community to help plan. Riding on the popularity of style in-

spirations from celebrities in the pages of fashion and celebrity lifestyle

magazines, The Knot carved out a niche (now transnational) market in

redefining life in the twenty-first century.16 As far as ecommerce went,

The Knot was certainly a leader. However, many others followed after the

digital revolution in bridal photography.

Bridal fashion’s transnational Markets

The parallel commercial development of Asian bridal practices with the

alternative mainstream American bridal industry allowed Asian immi-

grants and Asian Americans to seek ways to celebrate their wedding day

by looking to their respective homeland cultures. However, the circuitous

path toward Asia involved a number of informal transnational economies.

Asia provided not only material goods but also a source of labor and

endless creative design ideas. In order to stay current and competitive,

vendors from Temple City traveled to Asia several times a year to buy

new merchandise, to observe new trends, and even to outsource the labor

and materials for the production of wedding garments. This included

traditional costumes as well as white wedding dresses that were deemed

fashionable in the metropolitan cities of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

In The Beautiful Generation, Thuy Linh Tu investigates the simulta-

neously fraught yet enabling relationship between the garment industry

and the Asian American fashion designers who have benefited through

their “familial” ties with that industry.17 Without a doubt, Asian American

designers’ recognition and embrace of fashion have worked synergisti-

cally to bolster and fortify the overwhelming success of bridal couture

designers Vera Wang and Monique Lhuillier. The fondness for their gowns

by celebrities, elites, and fashionable women all over the world reveals a

startling tension between fashion and desire that remains unresolved,

but also reflects the positioning of Asian Americans and the niche im-

migrant bridal industry in the United States. Top bridal gown designers

create and project fashion and style through their products, but the price

points of these couture gowns make them beyond the reach of most

brides. This is where the niche Asian bridal industry enters the picture

142 • JAAS • 17:2

to facilitate the realization of fantasy for Asian American women. The

rising costs of weddings have made it more acceptable to rent gowns in

mainstream America, a practice that has been common in Asia.18 Brides

from nations in East and Southeast Asia have borrowed bridal attire for

generations, and Asian bridal shops made it acceptable, even customary,

for immigrants to continue this practice. The shopkeepers not only stock

dresses imported from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other fashionable urban

centers in Asia but also work with seamstresses in Los Angeles’s garment

district to create custom gowns for brides designing their own or copied

versions of designer gowns. Bridal shop owners keep up with the latest

trends in fashion as well as photography by attending trade shows in Asia

and the United States.19

By the 1990s, the dearth of bridal photography services for Asian

immigrants along with the increased culture of bridal glamour in the

United States, compelled immigrant entrepreneurs—many of whom had

careers in Asia as photographers and makeup artists—to seize the eco-

nomic potential for services solely devoted to weddings. More important,

capitalizing on their own knowledge and skills in the bridal industry, they

spearheaded and facilitated the cultural turn back to the homeland.20

Bridal photography practices from Asia began influencing the aesthetics

and desires of Asian American couples. With this embrace of homeland

culture, photographs became an important means to record a couple’s

life-changing event.

photographic practices Beyond the Quotidian

Premised upon the need to revel in life’s significant moments, particularly

through the purchase of certain commodities that animate those moments,

The Knot, through its success, provided a model for smaller immigrant

bridal shops that began to inform their clientele on the importance of

embracing the photographic process. Photography not only became an

inviting technology with which to capture precious life events but also

provided a vehicle for staging aspirational identities. As material objects

that record and inscribe the subjects within its frames, photographs carry

and evoke multiple valences. Tracing the technological, aesthetic, and

ideological functions of photography from the nineteenth through the


twentieth centuries, the works of scholars such as Laura Wexler, Shawn

Michelle Smith, and Anna Pegler-Gordon powerfully illustrate that pho-

tographic practices are not politically neutral in that they intervene in

intersecting discourses that unveil the complex nature of identity, race,

gender, class, and nation.21 Moreover, the discursive and visual properties

of photographic archives have functioned historically to codify the mean-

ings of American identity through narratives of national belonging and

exclusion. Following the theoretical framework of Smith, who studied how

nineteenth-century middle-class Americans “utilized visual conceptions of

identity to claim a gendered and racialized privilege,” I argue that modern

contemporary photography serves similar purposes of establishing social

and moral boundaries.22 Because photographs are visual and can be seen,

shared, and circulated by others, they enter the realm of public and political

discourses, or what Nigel Thrift calls “institutions of public intimacy.”23

As such, bridal photographs can be read as intimate acts of romance be-

tween couples that momentarily capture and display the consummation

of marital relationships. Nevertheless, the actual production of wedding

photographs simultaneously enlists the couple in creating visual images

while demanding the photographer’s presence to translate and sometimes

direct those moments of intimacy. The images work to reaffirm the couple’s

commitment to each other but also function to legitimate their new status

as married citizens to themselves and before intersecting publics—their

families, their surrounding communities, and other social institutions.

Although the eye of the photographer mediates the image captured

within the boundaries of the photographic frame, the subject can perform

and create alternative identities and embody a different interiority for

those who would view their images.24 Claiming the importance of visual

culture in identity formation, the Modern Girl Around the World Re-

search Group asserts, “Visuality was important to the self-representation

of all women (and men) who considered themselves ‘modern.’ Since

the nineteenth century, women had used photography along with older

media such as painting, drawing, and literary representations of female

spectacle and performance to stage the self.”25 This public presentation

of the self may be grounded in reality, but it is often built on fantasies,

desires, and aspirations. Embracing the photographic process itself forges

144 • JAAS • 17:2

a sense of belonging for the subjects within the frames of the image. While

bridal photographs have been produced locally and grounded within the

geographies of Southern California or wherever they were taken, Asian

American subjects often emphasize a cosmopolitan identity, particularly

through the staging, setting, and configuration of the couple. For example,

the couple in Figure 1 is posed in front of a private jet and shiny bright-red

Ferrari. The vehicles featured here are no ordinary means of transport but

luxurious, ostentatious, fast machines that give the newly wedded couple

immediate access to the world. It is unclear whether these extravagant

objects actually belong to them, but the married couple is embedded in a

scene that is suggestive of a grand, opulent mode of living. Moreover, the

image invokes a lavish globe-trotting lifestyle of overseas Asians possess-

ing flexible citizenship.26

photography and the production of “roMance”

Traversing the realms of the private and the public, visual images produced

to capture marriage bring into focus the struggle for social meaning about

citizenship, gender, and class. As bridal photography practices standardize

over time, and as visual scripts and aesthetic compositions form semiotic

patterns, it becomes possible to interpret how photographs animate certain

narratives about the subjects. Starting with the last decades of the twentieth

century, modern photography, particularly as it was transformed by the

digital age, became a welcome advanced technological tool for document-

ing everything related to the formation of the “family”—from the initial

engagement well into the life of the marriage, such as the experience of

maternity, babies’ firsts, and the celebration of the blissful unit. Reflect-

ing on photography and life experience, Hubert Damisch remarks, “The

photographic image does not belong to the natural world. It is a product

of human labor, a cultural object whose being—in the phenomenologi-

cal sense of the term—cannot be dissociated precisely from its historical

meaning and from the necessarily datable project in which it originates.”27

My own assessment of modern bridal photography expands upon Da-

misch’s thoughts about phenomenology to argue that the need to fulfill

social expectations influences the ways in which photographs are developed


and produced. It has become very common for a young man to contact

a professional photographer to capture “the proposal” as these moments

are increasingly public spectacles.28 The newly engaged couple then relies

on a professional photographer to capture the changing nature of their

courtship through engagement photos (see Figures 2 and 3 as examples

of this practice). While some couples choose to take photos in settings

where they met or spend time together, such as the couple in Figure 2,

a number of these photographs are taken at places of pleasure and con-

sumption, such as in a sports car, at an outdoor shopping mall, or, as seen

in Figure 3, in front of a Tiffany & Co. storefront. Here, as landmarks of

accomplishment and wealth (or the potential of wealth and happiness),

these settings prime the couple for a bright future of matrimony. Figure

3 shows a causally dressed couple, posed in front of the classic American

commercial establishment of love and romance, sealing their love with

a kiss. The social pressure to spend unrestrained amounts of money to

show one’s love with the purchase of an exorbitantly priced engagement

ring obliges even more demands for an extravagant wedding to come.

As the couple plans for their wedding day, the series of casual photo-

graphs are followed by a more formal prewedding fashion photo session

where they “practice” getting their pictures taken. These photo sessions,

which can take place in a studio or outdoors, represent the opportunity

for the couple to enact their vision of romance and love, unencumbered

by the rites and rituals expected of them on their wedding day (see Fig-

ure 4). These images, along with the engagement photos, will be shared

proudly with family and friends on the wedding day itself. Oftentimes, a

photograph of the couple from this prewedding session will be enlarged

into a life-sized portrait and boldly displayed at the wedding reception.

Of all the photographic practices, the wedding day pictures are the only

ones that include the couple’s extended community—their families and

friends. Thus, the couple is engaged in producing images of themselves

in multiple contexts and settings before they are formally recognized as a

married couple. The intent behind creating these romantic photographs is

to capture the happiness of the couple suspended in time. When browsing

through the online archive of Los Angeles-based Henry Wang’s photog-

raphy, for example, viewers can see a range of styles emerge to reflect the

146 • JAAS • 17:2




personalities of the different couples. In a unique photo shoot, one couple

decided to take black-and-white photographs in a rustic setting dressed as

people from the 1920s. Made to look like Bonnie and Clyde, they pose in a

classic antique car from the time period in front of a barn.29 Others choose

to don traditional ethnic wedding garb and dress in costume as emperor

and empress of China or other regal figures of the past.30 This anachronistic

engagement with fantasy enables the couple to enact different persona, or

fulfill a variety of roles playfully, as they work together to create memories

while remaking their own images together. The medium of photography

allows for these imaginary scenes of romance to be concocted with the

photographer, even as it remains impossible to remove the markings of

historical time and the social context from which the images are produced.

Nevertheless, the desire to be suspended in time, like the photograph itself,

demonstrates the flexibility associated with this medium.

The practice of taking the photographs ahead of time marks a clear

distinction between most Asian American weddings and standard Ameri-

can weddings. The other difference is that much attention is devoted to

glamorizing the couple, especially the bride, and portraying idealized im-


148 • JAAS • 17:2

ages of romantic love. In traditional American weddings, brides are not

supposed to be seen in their wedding dress before their wedding day.31

But for Asian Americans, in fact, photographs taken before the wedding

are much more important to the couple than those taken the day of the

event. In her study, Adrian explains that photos taken before the wedding

create narratives of romance. She notes that the romance is conjured by

the couple and the photographer, who tends to be male. There is little

doubt that ideas about romance conceived in these visual productions

are negotiated and produced; nevertheless, the vision belonging to the

bride most often emerges as the dominant one. Similar to the readers of

romance novels in Janice Radway’s insightful study, “romance” in bridal

photography “provide[s] a utopian vision in which female individuality

and a sense of self care are shown to be compatible with nurturance and

care for others.”32 Yet in a world where visual imagery about romance and

sexuality circulates transnationally, producers and subjects follow “visual

clichés” in order to create images signifying romance.33

Generally guided by gender scripts, bridal photography adheres to

traditionally rigid ideologies. However, when couples actively partici-

pate in the process, the act of conjuring images of romance allows them

to invert gender scripts and play with traditional notions of gender. As

Adrian suggests, the production of bridal photographs has the potential

to empower the bride and temporarily challenge the gender roles she is

expected to fulfill after the wedding.34 At the time of her study, Adrian

noted that unlike most photographic contexts where women’s bodies are

often eroticized and subject to the gaze of others, bridal photographers

in Taiwan worked to desexualize the bride so that she could bask in the

pleasures and glamour of the photo shoot.35

The sexual politics discussed in Adrian’s portrait of Taiwan in the

1990s have since shifted in the postmillennial photographic trends of

young Asian and Asian American couples in the United States. Although

the bridal body was previously regarded as a site of purity and sexual

innocence, particularly before the wedding, it is now common for the

bridal body to be portrayed as sexualized. With the increased practice

and acceptance of boudoir photography in the United States and perhaps

a more flexible attitude toward sexuality, contemporary photographs of


Asian American couples unveil the bride vacillating between sexual object

and subject.36 She is often portrayed with an alluring stare or intoxicatingly

suggestive smile. In the moments when the bridal body is the focal point

of the shoot, she appears to be commanding the gaze while her groom

glances at her or beyond her. Looking directly into the camera back at the

photographer/viewer, she challenges the onlooker’s gaze, while simultane-

ously inviting the gaze to fixate on her face and body (see Figure 5). Using

her body, and by extension her fashionable dress (and when featured in

a wedding dress she is accented by all the proper feminine accessories),

she looms large while the groom recedes into the background. Her body

can appear demure, nubile, and graceful, but increasingly she is shown

possessing or wielding some kind of power in the relationship. In some

cases, she may have made the majority of the decisions for the wedding,

as most brides do, but in others her power is visually symbolic. Adrian

argues that this inversion of traditional gender ideology reminds the

bride that she not only can be playful in these fields of visual production,

but also can indulge in feminist fantasies before committing to marriage.

Adrian is also quick to point out that after marriage, Taiwanese couples are

expected to adhere to dominant gender ideologies. Women, in particular,

are required to assimilate into traditional patriarchal and patrilineal house-

hold structures.37 The couple’s chances to establish a home of their own

after marriage are much greater in Southern California, despite escalating

housing prices. The photographs of wedded bliss essentially generate an

archival fantasy to which the couple can refer later in their married life.

These images are often displayed in living rooms and bedrooms of their

homes as a reminder of their commitment to each other. Moreover, they

serve as visual references for brides to negotiate power in marriage.

toward a theory of Bridal glaMour: lights, Makeup, and the Magic of photoshop

While weddings involve both the bride and the groom, the bridal indus-

try ensures that the bride is offered a dizzying array of choices when it

comes to matrimony. From what she wears and how she wears it to what

she chooses to do with her name and her body, the bride is hailed by all

kinds of vendors to make the most pressing decisions for the couple’s

150 • JAAS • 17:2

big day. With the goal of showing off their physical (and financial) assets

on their wedding day, it is not uncommon for brides to undergo radical

treatments, diets, and other bodily transformations to achieve their best

form.38 In terms of commodities, the bridal body can be adorned and

remade with everything from fashionable dresses, accessories, and shoes

to hairstyles, makeup, and even flowers depending on the wedding budget.

The choice of bridal attire may reveal a bride’s level of comfort with her

body and her style, but fashion trends often dictate how much skin a bride

bares, while social pressures demands more lavishness in her selections.

As such, it is much more common for brides to choose strapless dresses

than the more modest dresses worn by their mothers and grandmothers,

and fancier accessories than they initially imagine. Feminist scholarship

examining popular and visual culture has honed in on what many are

calling the postfeminist moment that emphasizes women’s sexual free-

dom and choice.39 However, the choices women make still rely heavily on

consumer products.

This participation in consumer culture requires an intense regimen of

self-maintenance that demands attentiveness to microscopic detail. These

Figure 5. Courtesy of Promise Wedding Studio.


reinstated traditional feminine practices aimed to impose bodily detail-

ing, self-surveillance, and excessive grooming are rituals of what Angela

McRobbie calls a “post-feminist (anti-feminist) masquerade” that work

to mask systemic male approval and patriarchal authority.40 The goal in

undergoing the various practices of transformation is to produce an allure

or a mystique in self-presentation. In theorizing the connected concepts

of allure and enchantment, Nigel Thrift writes, “This quality of allure is

being applied in all kinds of new ways, producing a more magical world

that is also, at one and the same time, more calculated. In the process,

new ‘intangible’ value is being generated for industries that are already

some of the world’s key means of making money.”41 Thrift’s work further

establishes a connection between goods and objects that functions effort-

lessly to create fictions of glamour in the social field. Thrift’s articulations

about the affective qualities of glamour provide a helpful framework to

understand the production of glamour in bridal photography as a normal-

izing practice among young couples.

Bridal photography relies heavily on consumer products to render a

wedded couple’s transcendence in American society symbolically, yet the

subjects of the photographs often depend on the transformative proper-

ties of makeup to change them from ordinary people to extraordinary

images worthy of notice. “Bridal makeup” has become regarded as the

quintessential aesthetic transformation for any woman. This aspirational

look achieved through the clever use of cosmetics and lighting to enhance,

conceal, and create illusions is now demonstrated through exponential

numbers of Internet tutorials on how to wear “bridal makeup.”42 Magazines

and online beauty sites also encourage women to adopt the “bridal look”

for their everyday appearance, thereby prolonging the beauty that brides

possess on their wedding day. Bridal hair is perfectly coiffed and bridal

makeup has the potential of turning any bride into a celebrity-like figure

capturing omnipresent attention. She possesses a “glow” that is uniquely

hers. Whereas her photographic self can be digitally manipulated to the

point where she becomes unrecognizable, photographers and image con-

sultants consistently inform me that brides want “ten to fifteen pounds”

taken off their wedding photos.43 Although some brides work hard to trim

down their bodies for the day of the wedding, others demand thinness

and the illusion of the slim bridal body without having plastic surgery

152 • JAAS • 17:2

through the altering of their bridal photographs. Moreover, makeup,

with its wonders, can widen and enlarge eyes, create the appearance of

slender noses, and remove any flaws from the skin, making it appear as

pore-less porcelain.

Unlike any previous moments in the couple’s life, this occasion lavishes

attention on them, marking a transformation in their status. Photography

frames the bridal face and body, making these features the primary focus

that captivates all gazes. Moreover, aesthetically, allure and glamour domi-

nate. As Thrift further asserts, “Glamour is about the special excitement

and attractiveness that characterizes some objects and people. Glamour is

a form of secular magic, conjured up by the commercial sphere. We might

see it as a fetish or as a means of feeling thought and tasting thought.

What is clear is we seek it out.”44 As significant subjects, the marrying

couple and the bridal body demand attention evocative of glamorous

self-presentation. The technologies of glamour thus work in conjunction

with commodities and contexts within the frame of each photograph.

The glamorous photographs essentially lock the couple into images

that idealize their relationship to be fulfilled by fantasy, beauty, and ro-

mantic love. These images largely imitate those that circulate in popular

culture and become the sources for the happy couple hoping to fulfill those

fantasies. Reflecting on the medium and the process of image production,

Susan Sontag writes,

Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed

because, unlike earlier ones, it is not dependent on an image-maker.

However carefully the photographer intervenes in setting up and guiding

the image-making process, the process remains an optical-chemical (or

electronic) one, the workings of which are automatic, the machinery

for which will inevitably be modified to provide still more detailed, and

therefore, more useful maps of the real. The mechanical genesis of these

images, and the literalness of the powers they confer, amounts to a new

relationship between image and reality.45

In the case of bridal photography, the new relationship forged between

reality and the images produced not only is circumscribed by images of

romance circulating in popular culture, but also serves to prescribe social

aspirations for advancement in American society. At the most superficial

level, the high-end photographic images appear to accentuate gender


differences and deemphasize racial markers, especially when couples are

ensconced in serenely natural settings such as a meadow or beach. Never-

theless, supplemental frames narrating the wedding suggest that class and

race infuse the bridal photographs, especially as the couple is surrounded

by expensive accouterments and commodities such as fine Tiffany jewelry,

Hermes cufflinks, Jimmy Choo shoes, Badgley Mischka gowns, and other

high-end designer accessories, including luxury vehicles that reflect their

elite status. Whether the material goods are owned, borrowed, or rented,

they function to elevate the wedded couple’s social and class standing or

enhance their self-image.

reading the Male Body

Until recently, little could be read of masculinity in bridal photography.

Because the photographic practice was feminized and focused on the bridal

body, less attention was paid to the groom. For the most part, the groom

has been depicted as an accessory to the bride, whereby his visibility fades

in and out of the frame. In some instances, such as the image in Figure 5,

his presence is blurred out, overshadowed by her body, or merely suggested

by a silhouette. In recent years, these practices have started to change as

Asian American men have begun to seize the opportunity to articulate an

alternative masculinity from that of the American mainstream. I want to

stress that partaking in these photo sessions enables men not only to assert

their own masculinity but also to play with and bend gender norms. Hence,

it is unsurprising to see a groom playfully submit to the dominance of his

new wife in photographs. In other settings, men embrace the opportunity

to demonstrate their wealth, status, and potential ability to provide for

the wedded couple. Enjoying the process of being photographed, some

construct an alternative masculinity or use the opportunity to create a

form of hypermasculinity by mimicking scenes from popular culture

such as gangster films or by posing in sportsman-like postures with their

groomsmen. In one example, a groom is featured as the leader of his team

in a huddle with other men.

Yen Le Espiritu, Robert Lee, and other scholars examining Asian

American representations in popular culture have argued that Asian

American masculinity must be understood within the framework of

154 • JAAS • 17:2

history.46 Due to economic and cultural imperatives, the racialization of

Asian American men has stereotyped them as “effeminate” and asexual.

The historical demonization of Asian American men as the yellow peril

and the repeated failures of American popular culture to portray them

realistically render few positive models for men. The circulation of ac-

tion films from Asia since the 1990s with stars such as Chow Yun-Fat, Jet

Li, and Jackie Chan has provided alternative images of masculinity for

Asian American men in the United States. The photograph in Figure 6 is

evocative of a scene from a Hong Kong crime flick. Working in tandem

(or perhaps in collusion) with a photographer (Asian American and male

in an overwhelming number of cases), the group possesses a slickness that

challenges the idea that Asian American men are incapable of possessing

“coolness” in other social settings in mainstream American society. It is

also in this space that the cool guy essentially gets the girl of his dreams

and marries her.



conclusion

Despite pressure to perform ethnicity and pay homage to their cultural

heritage, Asian American couples engage with popular culture and adopt

trends and practices amendable to their own identity as ethnic Americans.

While some couples perform rites and rituals on their wedding day for

their parents and other community members, they also choose to enact an

alternative, more personal identity for themselves as they become united

in matrimony. In the photographs taken before they are married, they

perform idealized romantic scenes where they are together isolated from

the rest of the world. From the engagement photos to the wedding photos

and beyond, the couple works with a photographer to realize their deepest

romantic fantasies while remaining respectable and tasteful.47 Encapsulated

in a medium that is itself a transforming technology, bridal photography

allows couples to indulge in choices of self-representation.

Photography promises to solve a vast array of potential social, cultural,

and ideological problems, but it is unable to conceal markers of race. In her

comments about photography’s centrality to the history of race and the

formation of citizenship, cultural critic and creative artist Coco Fusco as-

serts, “Rather than recording the existence of race, photography produced

race as a visualizable fact.”48 Asian American subjects who constructed

their cultural identities through bridal photography cannot elide their

race in the digital age. In fact, bridal shops in Temple City have endured

racist vitriolic attacks from within the community as they have become

scapegoats for urban transition and global restructuring instigated by an

emerging Asian population into the area and the perceived social, political,

and economic rise of Asia in general.49

In my research, I discovered that the visual productions made from

cultural practices surrounding matrimony—through codes of class,

discourses of respectability and multiculturalism, and performances of

heteronormative romantic love are meant to normalize and position Asian

immigrants as part of American society. However, the images created from

these attempts to “pass” can be interpreted as threatening to the American

way of life. The subjects are seen as racial foreigners attempting to impose

their ideas about romance, beauty, and family upon the local population,

and the gendered images produced through bridal photography are per-

156 • JAAS • 17:2

ceived as the promotion of illicit activities prostituting women, an idea

that harkens back to the racial discourses of the nineteenth century.50 Race

remains a significant barrier despite class achievement.

In historicizing the tensions created through visual imagery, I traced

the transnational roots and routes of the bridal photography industry

by examining the meanings and notions of beauty, romantic love, and

“culture” in the wedding practices of immigrant and second-generation

Asian Americans. Through this series of close analyses of visual produc-

tion, I attempted to make visual sense of the cultural practices involved in

bridal makeovers and bridal photography by critically deconstructing the

meanings behind the circuits of representations as well as the reasons why

people perform the cultural practices originating in Asia but adopted and

adapted for a lifestyle in the United States. I intend to do more interviews

with the subjects of the photographs and those who participate in these

practices of image making as I continue my research.

notes1. These numbers refer only to the industry in the United States, and do not

reflect specialized markets within the industry. Krystal Wynn, “Weddings by the Numbers (Infograph)” (August 30, 2011), http://www.bridepop.com/everything-else/weddings-by-the-numbers-infograph/.

2. There are conflicting estimates of the actual costs of weddings, and many of the prices are inflated and adjusted according to tastes and location, but the amount actually spent in most cases ends up higher than the price bud-geted. See these websites for details: http://blog.theknot.com/2013/03/07/average-wedding-cost-2013/; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/07/cost-of-a-wedding_n_2831445.html; and http://www.gobankingrates.com/savings-account/average-wedding-cost-actually-nowhere-near-25000/.

3. In this article, I focus on Asian Americans who identify with East and South-east Asia and the cultural forms most often associated with these nations. The wedding industry of the South Asian diaspora demands an entire study of its own. For more information, please see Kativa Ramdya, Bollywood Weddings: Dating, Engagement, and Marriage in Hindu America (Latham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011). For more insight on Asian American cultural productions, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), and Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian American Critique (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

4. The “cultural traditions” invoked are often symbolic and serve to pay homage to the couple’s heritage. These are often personally, communally, or com-mercially defined and do not adhere to actual rules and tenets of any culture.


In some ways, bringing “ethnicity” and “culture” into a wedding is optional. Please see the classic text on identity and ethnicity: Mary Waters, Ethnic Op-tions: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

5. Bonnie Adrian, Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

6. Y. Anu Saraswati, “Cosmopolitan Whiteness: The Effects and Affects of Skin-Whitening Advertisements in a Transnational Women’s Magazine in Indonesia,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 10, no. 2 (2010): 15–41.

7. Elsewhere, I explore the racial politics of these struggles; please see: Nhi T. Lieu, “Disrupting Nostalgic Scenes of Whiteness: Asian Immigrant Bridal Shops and Racial Visibility in the Ethnoburb,” Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies 3 (2013): 1–13.

8. Vicki Howard, Brides, Inc: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

9. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

10. Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For a study geared toward a popular audience, see Jacyln Geller, Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001).

11. Elsewhere, I elaborate on the global and demographic shift by examining the presence of bridal salons and racial politics of local spaces in Southern California. See Nhi T. Lieu, “The Business of ‘Fitting In’: Asian Immigrant Bridal Salons Transforming Bodies and Geographies” (paper, American Studies Association, Baltimore, October 23, 2011).

12. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik, Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

13. These aesthetics were initiated in Asia. Photos would sometimes be sur-rounded by grammatically incorrect, nonsensical phrases made to look like headlines in a Western publication. This practice was adopted for use in the United States, but it was short-lived.

14. Carley Roney and David Liu, “Something Old, Something New,” Time Business, November 15, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/business/ar-ticle/0,8599,1684491,00.html.

15. Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

16. InStyle magazine was a leader in instituting these trends. In additional to fashion and style, the magazine focused on celebrity life cycles, especially weddings and pregnancies, to satiate the public’s interest. Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood

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and How It Has Undermined Women (New York: Free Press, 2004); Otnes and Pleck, Cinderella Dreams.

17. Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Political Economy of Fashion (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).

18. Gerit Quealy, “When Something Borrowed Means the Dress,” New York Times (Fashion/Weddings), February 26, 2006.

19. Style coordinators, interviews with author at Lucy’s Bridal and Photography and Promise Bridal Studios, Temple City, Calif., August 3, 2010.

20. Indicative of this turn was the trade publication of books that provided somewhat problematic explanations and instructions for Asian American couples to incorporate “culture” in their weddings. See Shu-Shu Costa, Wild Geese and Tea: An Asian American Wedding Planner (New York: Riverhead Trade Press, 1998). Many found Costa’s book to reify and reinforce cultural essentialism, while others thought her emphasis on Chinese customs to stand in for “Asian American” to be highly contentious.

21. See the exemplary analyses of photography and its cultural meanings in Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Pho-tography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

22. Smith, American Archives, 5.23. Nigel Thrift, “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour,” in Affect

Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg, Gregory Seigworth, and Sara Ahmed (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 289–308.

24. Anna Pegler-Gordon calls these strategies the “honorary ethnographic,” a term she used to call attention to how subjects resist documentation through photography by asserting their own agency.

25. Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, “The Modern Girl as Heu-ristic Device: Collaborations, Connective Comparisons, Multidirectional Citation” in The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, eds. Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Y. Dong, and Tani Barlow (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 13.

26. For an important study on cultural citizenship, see Aiwah Ong’s Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).

27. Hubert Damisch, “Five Notes for the Phenomenology of the Photographic Image,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2002), 88.

28. Take, for example, the flash mob marriage proposal. No longer are propos-als an intimate act between a couple, but one that involves a community of people staging a production leading to the moment where the groom pops the question. Increasingly these intimate moments are no longer undocumented.


29. See Henry Wang’s photography blog. http://mrhenrywang.com/2012/09/vintage1920s-themed-e-session-los-angeles-engagement-session/

30. See Henry Wang’s photography blog. http://mrhenrywang.com/2012/10/e-session-union-station-pasadena-city-hall-albert-eva/

31. Although the practice of taking photographs before the wedding day has been common in Asia and in Asian immigrant and Asian American communities, I would argue that bridal photography has made it more acceptable in the United States in recent years.

32. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Litera-ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 55.

33. Adrian, Framing the Bride, 181; Laikwan Pang, “Photography, Performance, and the Making of Female Images in Modern China.” Journal of Women’s History 47, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 56–85.

34. Adrian, Framing the Bride, 202. 35. Ibid., 198.36. Since 2011, the Huffington Post has been running a number of articles fo-

cusing on boudoir photography. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/boudoir-photography/. In an earlier posting, Amy Haberland asks, “Does This Sexy Wedding Trend Go to Far?” as the title of her piece. (December 20, 2011). However, the title of the same piece has since changed to “In Defense of Bridal Boudoir” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-haberland/to-boudoir-or-not-to-boud_b_1151755.html. Also see: Marisa Leigh, “Where Did Boudoir Photography Come From?” (February 3, 2014) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marisa-leigh/where-did-boudoir-photography-come-from_b_4654991.html

37. Adrian, Framing the Bride. 38. Television shows such as Bridalplasty offer extreme plastic surgery makeovers

for the brides-to-be, while Exercise TV, an on-demand video program, makes several series devoted to shaping and preparing the bride for her wedding, including Bridal Body Burn and Bridal Boot Camp. Courtney Hutchinson, “‘Bridalplasty’: Plastic Surgery as a TV Prize?,” ABC News Medical Unit, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/bridalplasty-compete-nose-jobs-implants-dream-wedding/story?id=11663378 (accessed September 20, 2010); David Lieberman, “VOD Offers New Way to Work Out,” USA Today, January 17, 2006.

39. See Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and So-cial Change (London: Sage, 2009); Susan Douglas, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism’s Work Is Done (New York: Times Books, 2010).

40. McRobbie, Aftermath of Feminism, 66.41. Thrift, “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour,” 290.42. YouTube.com showcases numerous makeup instructional videos for women

so they can learn to put on makeup for their own wedding. For example, see http://www.frmheadtotoe.com/2009/08/bridal-makeup-video-tutorial.html.

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43. Bridal consultant for Promise Wedding Studio, interview with author, Temple City, Calif., August 2, 2010.

44. Thrift, “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour,” 297. 45. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973), 123.46. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men (Thousand Oaks, Calif.:

Sage, 1996); Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Nguyen Tan Hoang, “The Resurrection of Brandon Lee: The Making of a Gay Asian American Porn Star,” in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

47. In Bonnie Adrian’s detailed ethnographic research, she mentions one incident where a photographer had to submit to the request of a couple to have their photos taken in the nude. She explained that this private album made for the couple was used to capture their youth and beauty but also indulged them in the fantasy of celebrity. See Adrian, Framing the Bride, 219–21.

48. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis, eds., Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 16; Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America, 10.

49. Denise Hamilton, “Bridal Shop Owners Denounce Crime Rumors as Rac-ist: Temple City: Talk That Businesses Are Fronts for Money Laundering and Prostitution Angers the Community’s Growing Asian Population,” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1994, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-01/local/me-52664_1_temple-city (accessed August 2, 2010).

50. I explore this in greater detail in my work on race and the visual configuration of Asian Americans and immigrants in the “ethnoburb.” See Lieu, “Disrupting Nostalgic Scenes,” 1–13.

Fashioning Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Transnational Gazes and the Production of Romance in Asian/American Bridal Photography

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