A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

Crucial to any wedding is the photographer who commemorates the moment, but the poor person's own face rarely shows up in a newlywed's album. When TIME . decided to do a story on the resurgence of the traditional formal wedding, Photographer Neil Leifer came up with a way to redress that injustice.

Leifer has shot 27 covers for TIME on subjects ranging from prison life to America's love for cats. Most recently he photographed the heroic proportions of the U.S. aircraft carrier Carl Vinson by suspending a remote camera from the bow of the ship. Formal weddings are tame by those standards. The subject reminded Leifer of a Norman Rockwell illustration, so he took his camera somewhere it seldom goes -- to a portrait studio. He explained, "Roupen Agopian of the Bachrach studio let me photograph him photographing a young couple. I marveled that he took only 45 minutes to complete the session. I had planned to shoot him for two hours."

Midwest Reporter Michele Donley, who covered the story in Chicago, found today's nuptials a bit more starchy than her own 1983 ceremony, which featured a rock-'n'-roll band composed of editors and reporters from a local newspaper. "I'm delighted to learn that brides and bridegrooms rather than their mothers are deciding what their weddings will be like. How else could it be their day?" she said. "The return to tradition beats the days of getting married in swimming pools, but I fear some of this emphasis will turn the wedding into a lock-step series of events that don't reflect the couple's style. Those I interviewed sounded eager to have all the planning over with."

Reporter-Researcher Elizabeth Bland, who worked on the story in New York City with Contributor Jay Cocks, found herself recalling one of the more memorable weddings she attended as a guest. "It was at a public park on the banks of the Mississippi in Memphis. The couple hadn't asked the city for permission, so the bride's little brothers got there early to make sure the area was clean." Bland says: "The large-scale weddings popular now are stylish, but they shouldn't have to be costly to be meaningful. They place too great an emphasis on money."

But that's the tradition of weddings: the need for something old, something new -- and something borrowed from the bank.