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Last year I was contacted by someone on Flickr who was collecting wedding photos for a book about the unseen wacky and wild sides of brides. They wanted to use this photo in the book. I was a little weirded out by the fact that they were building a book of photographs that they weren't paying for (??) but I agreed to let them use the photo, contingent on them mentioning Offbeat Bride in the caption. These are the things one does when trying to publicize a book.
Anyway, their book is finally out, and it makes me SO ANGRY. Sure, they failed to credit Offbeat Bride as agreed, but that's actually a relief, because I don't want my book to have anything to do with this one. I'm not even going to tell you the name of the book, because I refuse to do promotion-by-proxy for these folks, but I have to tell you about how much this book sucks and how pissed I am that my photo is in it.
Despite the fact that the authors publicly announced that the book wouldn't be “mean-spirited,” the captions mock every bride in the book for being drunk, trashy, geeky, weird, angry or any number of other things including … dressed up in a costume. Because yes, despite supposedly containing “Wedding photos you were never meant to see,” the book contains several Halloween and cosplay shots that weren't taken at weddings at all. This one comes to mind — it shows a costume-maker wearing an Arwyn dress she made. She's not a bride. The photo isn't from a wedding.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the QUALITY of the pictures in the book. Most of the photos are crunchy and low-resolution web shots, so they look bad. I mean, really really bad. The book not only mocks brides, but then it has the audacity to look like it was produced on a dot matrix printer.
I'm certainly not offended by them mocking my wedding picture — I'm the one who calls my wedding a freakfest, for fucksake! — but I'm totally angered by the misrepresentation of the project, mocking of nontraditional brides, shit print quality, and fact that it's supposedly wedding pictures when some of the folks are obviously not at weddings. The book seems to be aimed at straight and narrow brides who want to mock anyone who deviates from the “demure princess with a closed-mouth smile” routine.
Anyway, I did what any disappointed reader would do: I wrote a carefully worded negative review on Amazon. In response, someone wrote a review that included reference to “not trusting reviews from the monster brides in the book.”
OH NO YOU DI'INT. Did you just call me a fucking MONSTER BRIDE?!
Anyway, this post serves no purpose other than to bitch and say that some authors are lame and you should never let anyone reprint your wedding photos ever. Pthththth!
