Fairytale for Sale
Natasha Caruana (UK)

Fairytale for Sale explores wedding customs in the UK, revealing the fantasy, performance and trophy moments of the traditional big day. The series consists of online adverts of brides wearing redundant wedding dresses.

The smiling faces of the bride, groom and their entourages’ are blocked out in white, cloned over, smothered in blue tac or scratched off in a bid to disguise and make anonymous their private day now in the public arena. What remains are bizarre theatres of marriage; white-faced performers have taken to the stage and act out emblematic scenes.


The original wedding album represents the trophy, the validation of a ceremony, a ritual performed, a tradition upheld as a record of the perfect day.

But now the party is over, the cake has been eaten, the presents have been opened, and the photographs have been framed; the online adverts represent the detritus, the props of the fairytale wedding production.

Natasha Caruana is a photographic artist living and working in London. She has an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London and is a Senior Lecturer of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK. In 2014 Caruana was named as the winner of the prestigious BMW Artist in Residence Award at musée Nicéphore Niépce, France. The award led to solo shows at Les Rencontres d’Arles and Paris Photo and the monograph Coup de Foudre.



Caruana’s art practice is grounded in research concerned with narratives of love, betrayal and fantasy. Significant to all Caruana’s work is the questioning of how today’s technology is impacting relationships. www.natashacaruana.com