Navajo Wedding
This past holiday season, I was hired to photograph a Navajo wedding by some friends of mine. This was the first time I’ve witnessed a traditional wedding. Brian and Dionne Tandy were married right here in Gallup, New Mexico at a relatives house.
What I found interesting was that, while the many of the rituals and ceremonial stuff were based on Navajo wedding traditions, there were elements of a contemporary wedding as well. This manifested itself to me in the cake cutting. Earlier in the day during the heart of the wedding ceremony, Brian and Dionne had fed each other blue corn mush. Later they cut cut the cake fed it to each other as well.
It was a beautiful, relaxed and open ceremony full of Navajo traditions I was unfamiliar with, but in the end it sort of amounted to the same thing; two families unified by the act of marriage.
To see a more complete gallery of images, please go to my website.
Like the rest of the country, western New Mexico has had it’s share of snow this winter. To a Midwesterner like myself, I can’t say that it rivals the amount we would get living along the western coast of Lake Michigan, but it’s no less fun. In fact, it’s more like an invitation to continue to getting out and having fun, even as the biking season winds down. The Zuni Mountains are a fantastic set of mountains to explore, their smooth and rolling nature lends itself to short backcountry excursions with your choice of up and downs along the small ridges, or just cruising along in the open meadows. And when it’s all done, there is nothing better than coming back to the warmth of a friends cabin.
