Documenting Ethnic Wedding Traditions in America: The Photographs of Katrina Thomas

“Documenting Ethnic Wedding Traditions in America: The Photographs of Katrina Thomas,” an exhibition of work by Katrina Thomas (BMC Class of 1949), will open on Tuesday, September 23 in the Canaday Library Class of 1912 Rare Book Room. The exhibition was curated by Tracie Wilson, 2007-2008 Post-Doctoral Fellow in Scholarly Information Resources, and Jenny Castle (BMC 2009). The images were selected from a collection of more than 800 photographs that Thomas donated to Bryn Mawr College in 2007, along with extensive notes about each wedding. Extracts from these notes are incorporated in the descriptions of the individual photographs.

Thomas began photographing ethnic festivals and parades in the late 1960s as a way of documenting the increasingly diverse nature of American society. Within a few years she focused on weddings, in which she could see the importance of cultural traditions to a community more clearly than in the often-scripted and commercialized festivals. By capturing the weddings on film, she was able to highlight a community’s religious and cultural traditions while revealing how those traditions were changing in a new world.

Over the last thirty years, Thomas has photographed weddings in more than 70 ethnic and religious communities. Most of the weddings were celebrated on the East Coast, but she also recorded ceremonies across the United States. While the greatest number took place in recent immigrant families, there are also many in older immigrant communities. Thomas sought out weddings where the family had decided to maintain or revive their group’s ceremonial traditions, although often enacting them within a contemporary context.

The entire collection of photographs can be found online as part of the Tri-College Digital Collections: http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm4/wedding.php.

Katrina Thomas has had a long career as a free-lance photographer. She worked extensively in Africa and the Middle East, and her photographs have appeared in Aramco World, Time, Newsweek, and publications of the US Information Agency. Her ethnic wedding photographs were featured in Something Old, Something New: Ethnic Weddings in America, a traveling exhibit co-sponsored by Modern Bride Magazine and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia in the 19080s. She is also the author of three photographic books for children, My Skyscraper City: a Child’s View of New York (1963), Chito (1968), and Oh, Boy! Babies! (1980).

The opening reception, hosted by the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library, will be held from 4:30 to 6:00 PM. Comments by Katrina Thomas and Tracie Wilson will begin at 5:15 PM. The exhibition will be open from September 23 through December 19. The exhibition hours are 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. For additional information, contact the Special Collections Department at 610-526-6576.