In Malta the institution of marriage now identifies with few things more indispensible than white weddings, pretentious (aka as sumptuous) reception halls, high music in church and pop music at the venue, lists of hundreds of guests invited, exotic food stands, flowing champagne – or is it prosecco? And photographers.

Today it would be utterly inconceivable to have a wedding uninfected by photographers – this is the social event in which the cameraman is considered almost as essential a fixture as the spouses themselves. It was not always so, not by a stretch.

During the first 60 or 70 years of photography in Malta, very few seem to have hit on the axiom that weddings and photos could coexist. The first wedding photos of Maltese couples I have seen date to around 1905 but, exceptionally, slightly earlier too. Up to the mid-1920s they still remain anything but ordinary or standard. In fact, weddings are not even mentioned in adverts by early studios as events in which you would consider the presence of a photographer to be desirable. We’ve moved rather far from that today.

It is difficult for me to pinpoint with any precision the dates of the first wedding photos in Malta. Pre-1925 ‘Maltese’ ones are quite rare. I have heard of a few from Victorian times, but I have not come across many. The only 19th-century wedding photos taken in Malta seem to have been of British spouses – residents or visitors – and that would be in line with British custom, which embraced wedding photography quite early on, long before the usage started rubbing onto the natives.

I am opening this review with a very early not-quite-Maltese wedding photo taken in Malta on June 4, 1881, following the marriage in St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral of a British wine merchant from Marsala, Sicily, Joshua Whitaker, with his 19-year-old bride Euphrosyne Manuel, of Greek ancestry (Fig. 1).

The photo is snapped on a Valletta rooftop, using natural light, rather than in a studio, and includes not only the families of the spouses, but the other guests too, all showing off their smartest summer outfits. There seem to be no bridesmaids or flower girls. Not one present, I believe, is Maltese. The second gentleman from the left, sitting on the floor, is the uncompromising anglophile William Hardman, who wrote some pretty fine Maltese history but would rather die than find a good word for a Maltese who disagreed with an Englishman.

A splendid wedding photo of a Maltese bride, very likely also 19th century, still has some obscure angles to it. The bride is the very attractive Evelyn Segond, the Maltese daughter of the Consul for Guatemala, Ottone E. Segond, and Paolina Balbi (Fig. 2).

That is all that is known so far about this extraordinary image. Personally, I rather doubt the picture was shot in Malta – somewhere in the UK? The photographic style does not immediately bring to mind any Maltese camera artist, nor was cramming a wedding image with eight people expected of a Maltese studio. Most of the sitters hardly seem Maltese, and the Union Jack as a backdrop is another feature I don’t recollect ever seeing used in Malta. I stand willingly to be corrected – maybe it is a ‘Maltese’ photo after all.

Queen Victoria launched a fashion that has already lasted over 170 years. Before that, brides would wear any colour to their liking and no standard practice oppressed wedding fashion

Richard Ellis’s archive is reputed to house a fabulous collection of early wedding portrait­ure. Here is a late-Victorian one of an unidentified couple certainly by Ellis with eight people in it. Is the elderly seated lady a witness, or the mother of one of the spouses? (Fig. 3).

Maltese wedding photos are extremely rare in the 19th century, but one exception is a truly gorgeous one: the 1895 Pace-Vella wedding, both families with strong British connections. The young and beautiful Mary Pace, only daughter of a future president of the Chamber of Commerce, Francesco Pace, and an Irish lady, was united in matrimony with the army officer Alfred Vella who, as lieutenant colonel, eventually commanded the Royal Malta Artillery during World War I and later became a senator for the Strickland Constitutional Party. The groom too had Irish blood in his veins – a descendant of the adventurous Elisabeth O’Kelly O’Riley.

The bride’s wedding photograph is one of my absolute favourites, nothing short of a little masterpiece – cleverly composed and illuminated, it brings together five girls of different ages, each one the epitome of elegance, poise and grace (Fig. 4). A bridal procession ad­vances, conscious of the solemnity of ritual and the mystique of religion. The groom, as often, was edged out of the wedding picture, possibly to ensure the aesthetic integrity of the image. What you would expect from the photographer Salvatore Lorenzo Cassar, no less.

Another early truly ‘Maltese’ wedding photo I know of is by Chev. Horatio Agius of Cospicua and Vittoriosa; it dates from c.1905 (Fig. 5). Agius was the very first Maltese ‘mass production’ professional photographer specialised in landscape, harbour views, townscape and costumes, but he also carried on a thriving business in studio portraiture. He passed away, aged 65, on June 6, 1910.

His great business rival would have been Richard Ellis who, ironically, acquired some, if not all, of Agius’s negatives after his death. The backs of Agius’s photos put the minds of the disheartened at ease – they come, they reassure us, “from the rewarded photographic studio of Chev. Horatio Agius – prize medals awarded from great many exhibitions held in different places of the world”.

The Agius wedding photo shows a Maltese middle class couple, he in gala white tie and top hat, she in long dress and veil. Her corset constricts her waist to an hourglass profile. She looks young and wholesome, and with a distinct hint of heavy, perhaps negroid, features. The image is monochrome; I rather suspect she may not be wearing white, but a light blue or pink gown.

Necessarily associating white with wedding gowns is a common modern misconception. It was only when Queen Victoria opted for a white gown in her solemn love union to Prince Albert on February 10, 1840, that white became imperative law in weddings – almost subversive to wear any other colour.

Victoria launched a fashion that has already lasted over 170 years. Before that, brides would wear any colour to their liking and no standard practice oppressed wedding fashion. In fact, medieval France had white as the colour of mourning, and in Scandinavia, brides generally wore black.

In other countries, brides opted for whatever colour they liked, if, that is, they opted for anything extraordinary at all. Over time, what the bride came to wear became a very distinctive ‘wedding gown’, different in concept and autonomous in fashion, from mainstream feminine clothing.

This is a rather recent development. Before, the bride wore her best ‘ordinary’ dress, not a specifically crafted gown dedicated to the marriage day. The Francesco Zimelli image of a Maltese society bride of the Rohan period on her wedding day shows a lady in a rich multi-coloured attire, prevalently black.

Weddings as a major family pageant are also quite recent. Older marriages only had any social significance when they represented the unions of rich or powerful families and dynasties, and then the festivities would be commensurate to the political or financial importance of the event. People wore whatever lavish costumes they could afford – it was an exercise in ostentation and an affirmation of power.

Totally different was the ordinary marriage between the ordinary couple. This was essentially a non-event – little or no festivity, no social impact. Only gradually, with the levelling down of society and with the aspiration of the working classes and of the bourgeoisie to be no less than the aristocracy, that commonplace weddings between commonplace people started to become more and more of a social status affirmation and a happening.

There is evidence of wedding festivities in 19th century Malta, but for only two strata of the population: the aristocracy, bourgeoisie and the moneyed ranks certainly celebrated marriages with dedicated feasts and receptions, not too different from ours in striving for a balance between sophistication and ostentation. Again, evidence survives of wedding festivities of country people – Maltese folklore proves quite rich with these more primitive ‘rural’ celebrations.

But what about those in the middle? The inconspicuous townsfolk, the proletariat, the manual workers? How did they marry? I have never come across any mention of an urban wedding celebration of this class. Did they associate wedding with any festivity at all? If that is the case, why is it never recorded? Where has the evidence disappeared? This to me is a lacuna and a mystery I have been so far unable to penetrate.

Here is a – rather unusual - description by a British resident in Malta of a 1910 Maltese engagement and wedding, presumably rural: “Marriages in Malta are largely arranged by the parents, the happy pair often meeting for the first time in the role of lovers at the ceremony of the betrothal, called il-kelma.

“At this gathering of friends and relatives the young man presents his fiancée with a fish, containing a ring in its mouth, and the respective mothers mix aniseed, salt and honey together, with which they rub the lips of the intended bride, the mixture being supposed to make her affable and prudent. Rings like those seen in Italy, with the symbols of hands united, are exchanged.

It is the only one day in an ordinary woman’s whole existence when she will be the protagonist of anything at all, and she wants that one and only day to be extra special

“The marriage itself is the occasion of great gaiety and, in the country usually terminates with a rustic dance and a feast, at which the bride and the bridegroom drink out of the same cup to signify their happy union. The priest who marries them is generally given, as his fee for the ceremony, a cake and a couple of bottles of wine.”

The author, Fredrick Ryan, makes it sound like he was describing contemporary customs he had witnessed personally. I have my doubts. If he was, haven’t we moved far from all this? The narrative misses one quite significant point: the dowry the wife was expected to bring to the marriage.

Even Roman wisdom decreed that indote puellae illocabiles videntur (girls without a dowry remain on the shelf). Because marriage was about love, but throwing in a bit of money-making never upset a Maltese. Do-gooder philanthropists repeatedly left sums of money to be distributed to indigent young women to enable them to find a husband, knowing full well that without the bait of a dowry they stood no chance of marriage, and that the alternative to marriage would be a lifetime of prostitution.

What appears anomalous is that the engagement kelma only bound the man. The girl, according to James Webster, was free to renege on the parola if and when she felt like it. Webster recorded a recent graffito he had seen in the Bishop’s prison, engraved by a man who had been immured underground for 18 months for refusing to go through with a marriage he had unguardedly promised a woman and then had second thoughts about. For him, the dungeon was bad, and marriage even worse. No questions, please, if any others agree.

All this generally tallies with an earlier account by an American observer in the island. Andrew Bigelow noticed that “the maidens of Malta are marriageable very early. They become wives frequently at 12, 13 and 14 years of age, and some have been wedded even earlier. Usually the selection of husbands is not left to their discretion”.

A friend of Bigelow had taken in a 13-year-old girl, who left after a month because she was getting married. When asked to whom, she replied she had no idea, but was sure her mother had made a good choice and she was quite happy to go along.

Differently from the 19th century and earlier, today the wedding ceremonial in itself has become massively central to the spouses, to all spouses, wherever they fit in the social pecking order, and perhaps more so to the bride.

One could be cynical and speculate why: it is the only one day in an ordinary woman’s whole existence when she will be the protagonist of anything at all, and she wants that one and only day to be extra special.

Before their wedding, and after it, most people fade out in a sea of anonymity. Bully for them for insisting on making a big noise on the only day in their whole lifetime in which they are likely to be central to anything. And even more bully for the wedding industry to cash in so ravenously on that insecurity.

The fact is that social evolution, or revolution, reflected itself massively in wedding photography.

Evidence of wedding fashions during the 19th century in Malta is still devastatingly scarce. Sufficient data however survives to support the assumption that the political divide also reflected itself in wedding clothes: those who curried favour with our British owners, aped British fashions, lived in British neighbourhoods, and had steak, porridge, bacon and cheddar at table; those who resisted the anglicisation of Malta remained faithful to the older indigenous and Italian modes and customs.

Emblematic of all this is the tragi-comedy of the widow Maria Carmela Borg, née Mamo, who on October 1, 1856, married in Valletta the Englishman Robert Turner. She had the temerity to wear an English bonnet to go with her wedding gown – just fancy that, an English bonnet.

This provoked a popular riot in the streets of the city, and the security forces had to intervene to save her from the fury of the mob and restore a semblance of order. Eleven of the more violent hooligans ended in detention and hauled before the magistrates’ courts. How dare a Maltese woman wear “an imitation of an English costume” on her wedding day?

This shameful episode of bigotry and intolerance is pregnant with social and political meaning, besides the loud statement about national identity it makes, sadly in such an uncouth and grotesque manner. Over time and very slowly, British fashion prevailed, first in the upper strata, then universally. Or perhaps, it is fairer to say it prevailed by the time British fashion had become virtually indistinguishable from international fashion.

(To be concluded)