The promise of happiness: desire, attachment and freedom in post/apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article examines wedding photographs. The wedding day is read as a staging of the achievement of desire and love, articulated through the use of space, objects and artefacts to project a vision of the self. The wedding ritual is not only framed by the presence of the camera, the gaze of the camera actually makes sure that the script is followed. This staging of romance is read through the notion of the ‘bridal gaze’, which places the figure of the bride at the centre of the achievement of fairytale romance and the promise of a future ‘happily ever after’. The images and affects of happiness in these ‘love plots’ are implicated in processes of identification and subjectivation that rely on relations of the gaze and ‘the look’, logics of self-image and self-possession, and the ritualised performance of romantic love as a site of freedom. I argue that nostalgia is invoked as a narrative strategy in wedding photographs in ways that place wedding rituals and the photographs produced out of them in and out of time with the present. The promise of happiness shared by the individuals ‘in love’, and the audiences that share in the ritualised performance of it, reflect the desire for inclusion within the progressive narrative of freedom in post/apartheid South Africa and the recognition of its flimsy presence, absence, promises and failures.