In the year 2000 I received an invitation from a person who worked in the Casa de Detenção de São Paulo (House of Detention of Sao Paulo), popularly known as Carandiru, to help with the celebration of a collective wedding that would be take place there.
The brides of the prisoners, who were free women, insisted on getting married wearing bridal dresses. I had, in my atelier, many bridal dresses, so I decided to make their dreams come true: I lent these women the dresses, and helped to make them up.
This process became a work of art. After the brides were ready I photographed them, and asked what motivated them to get married dressed as brides inside jail, with a violent man. Their answers were all very similar: they said they knew many women who were unhappy with their relationship, and who spent years being lonely or mistreated. In their cases, on visitor’s day, which happened once a week, their men waited for them wearing perfume, anxious, madly in love, and missing them. So the fairy tale was inverted – in the “Romantic Love” tradition, the waiting belonged to the women…
These pictures are the register of that day.