These unassuming wedding photos poke holes in the patriarchy

By Leah Dolan, CNN

(CNN) — Vibeke Tandberg met her husband at the bar. And the next one. And the husband after that. In fact, she met all 11 of her husbands at a bar in Bergen, Norway.

She became a bride in the summer of 1993, with a puff-sleeved gown trimmed in lace in the style popularized by Princess Diana. There was no ceremony, no priest and no guests — just a professional photography studio, a purple backdrop and almost a dozen different grooms.

Tandberg, a prominent Norwegian artist and the subject of a newly opened exhibition at Kode Bergen Art Museum, wasn’t an early pioneer of polyandry. In reality her multiple husbands, although lovely, were fake. She had poached them from the bartop stools of her favorite student drinking hole for a photography series she was working on in her second year at Bergen Academy of Art and Design.

“Bride” began as an exploration of the wedding photography tradition; a genre that tends to flatten female identity neatly into the shape of a white dress. By contrast, Tandberg wanted her version of performed matrimony to be more empowering to women. “I was choosing the men, I was the center of the photograph,” she said during a video call from her home in Bergen. A rotating roster of different men emphasized her “stage position” as the photo’s only constant, she said. Brides were expected, in most cultures at various points in history, to be virginal, pure and dedicated to their husbands. Through her 11 portraits, Tandberg created an inherently subversive character: the promiscuous bride.

The images were captured over a two-day shoot. Tandberg’s dress was borrowed from a local bridal shop, under the proviso they could use the images as adverts, and her bouquets were made from flowers she picked out of the city’s public flower beds. Meeting her husbands was easy. “It was my student years,” Tandberg said wryly. “I spent six days a week at the bar in Bergen.” The collaborative nature of “Bride” was a welcome shift to Tandberg’s previously solitary way of working. “I always worked alone, so I thought: ‘Let’s make, like, a party out of it.’”

Despite photography being Tandberg’s artistic medium of choice, she enlisted a commercial studio to take the pictures. “It was so fun for me to not be behind the camera,” she said. “Not controlling lighting, anything.” She wanted to enter the photographic tradition earnestly — not just imitate its specificities. The professional photographer who shot the images choreographed every pose as he would a typical paying newly-wed couple. “For him, it was business as usual,” she said. “I just got the exact pictures he would do of anyone else getting married.”

“Bride” was originally exhibited at Fotogalleriet in Oslo in 1993, but Tandberg wanted her images to go one step further in the cycle of realism. She submitted a different couple photo to several regional Norwegian newspapers, pretending they were sincere portraits for the wedding section. 23 newspapers published them with a formal announcement, many of them on the same day or the day after. “The meaning of it was to have it confirmed, verified,” she said. “Real photographs, real events becoming truth through media.” The Swedish photography magazine Index the first to expose the stunt, then the national press followed. “When the press is fooled, they really want to get on top of it,” Tandberg said. “So I got a lot of press on it.” Seemingly overnight, she was launched to national fame.

But behind the feminist statement and clever subversion, something else happened. “When I first saw myself in this wedding outfit, I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ It touched me somehow,” Tandberg said. The tough, macho guys she recruited also became misty-eyed. “Some of them would actually tear up at the sight of me, because we were all young at the time. No one was married, no one had done this.” It was more evidence than Tandberg bargained for on how deep the emotional attachment is to these cultural institutions. In that moment, she said, “the coolness of postmodern thinking evaporated.”

The artist is adamant a series like “Bride” wouldn’t work in the age of social media and AI, and when so much trust in the media has been eroded. “We don’t have the same belief in what we read and see and hear. We are skeptical,” she said. “Today, it would be nothing more than a gimmick.”

The images are on show again at the Kode Bergen Art Museum, alongside clippings from some of the duped newspapers, in a survey of Tandberg’s work running until September. “Bride” was just the beginning for Tandberg, who has been fascinated by characters, performance and disguise throughout her entire artistic career. She’s been experimenting with fleshy, Halloween-style masks for over 20 years (“Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase” 2003, “Old Man Cowboy” 2022-2023 and “They Live” 2026), and was at the forefront of early digital editing tools like Adobe Photoshop. In her 1998, her series “Faces” Tandberg blended her visage with other peoples — an experiment that now feels quaint in the face of generative AI.

Today, the artist is slightly nervous about the attendance of some of her husbands  — particularly number 11, the back-up that ensured she would have at least 10 photographs if one recruit bailed on the project. Their wedding photo only appears in a newspaper fragment, as Tandberg never made a full-size print. “Last week I was devastated,” she said. “I really thought of making a print of him at the last second but I didn’t have time. So I’m nervous that he’ll show up.” Does she stay in touch with any of them? “One of them is my neighbour in Oslo,” she said. “I see him occasionally… I know him, I know his wife.”

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