Mission Santa Clara de Asís, the first mission to be named for a woman, still hosts wedding rituals. It was during one of these services that I first visited the mission. Women who become nuns undergo a similar ritual during which they are “married” to God, receiving a wedding ring, eating wedding cake, even wearing white. Chiara Offreducio (later known as Saint Clare of Assisi) became a nun to escape a secular marriage. It occurred to me that treating Chiara’s wedding as any other wedding might draw interesting parallels between the way women are treated in each of these marriages. The way in which I sought to portray Saint Clare’s wedding was with the familiar wedding album.
This raised a practical issue, as Mission Santa Clara is still a working church, run by Jesuit priests. I found a friend willing to play Saint Clare, and her boyfriend was willing to personify the Catholic Church as Jesus. My boss played the priest who married them. We snuck into the mission around 7:30 AM on a Sunday, as Mass starts at 10:00 AM. After making sure the coast was clear, we hurried into the church. The podium set up for Mass served perfectly, and I was able to get a few shots before the caretaker came in and gave us a strange look. We took that as our cue to leave, and finished the rest of the shots outside with nothing but a few strange looks.