These are Iris Hsueh and Ian Ciou. They are getting married in January, but they probably took a sneak peek with this photo. Location: Puli, in the middle of Taiwan and a three-hour journey from their hometown of Taipei in the north. Puli is not a metropolis, but there are a number of impressive Buddhist temples nearby. Take the photogenic, modern-looking Chung Tai Chan Monastery with its concrete hole-in-the-wall facade and gleaming gold tower: a beautiful location for a pre-wedding shoot, you might say. But Iris and Ian didn’t go there.
For the past three years, Puli has also been home to one of the fastest growing garbage dumps in Taiwan, located on the site that was previously a parking lot for garbage trucks. Initially, the landfill would be temporary. But for the past three years, 50,000 kilos of waste have been added every day, so for the time being the Puli garbage dump is going nowhere. It won’t be long before the dirt consumes the monumental entrance gate of the old parking lot.
In front of the entrance gate, with a blue sky in the background and a yellow excavator on top of the mountain of colorful bags – quite aesthetically pleasing – the bridal couple posed for the photographer. In full regalia, the groom in a neat black suit, the bride in a romantic white dress with lots of tulle and gauze, they kissed each other. The photos (there is also another image of the bridal couple proudly and happily looking into the camera) were picked up by the local media and quickly spread around the world.
“I didn’t think it would have such a big impact,” said the bride, a 33-year-old campaigner with Greenpeace. She and her fiancé have a climate-friendly wedding in mind. Because they don’t want to throw away any food, they would like their guests to bring their own containers from home to transport what is left over from the wedding dinner afterwards. The photo is intended as an incentive. “If some guests are not willing to bring a container, I show them this photo and say, ‘Would you like to reconsider?’” Hsueh told local reporters.
In recent years, more unusual wedding photos have gone viral, in which natural phenomena and climate change played a role. There was a bridal couple who promised each other eternal loyalty with the gray ash clouds of the erupting Philippine Taal volcano in 2020 in the background; in 2021, an Australian wedding couple had their photographers photographed near a flooded river; and there were several wedding couples in the United States posing in front of grim forest fires. In all those photos the threat was real, but the dangers mainly formed a dramatic backdrop for the couple, symbolically contrasting with their early happiness.
Iris Hsueh and Ian Ciou took their pre-wedding photo one step further. This is a message, a warning. The engaged couples laugh and look delighted, but they mean business. It was not without reason that they traveled three hours to Puli to show off the garbage dump and convince their guests not to contribute even more to the unimaginable amounts of waste that Taiwan produces every day.
The fact that the bride works for Greenpeace will make some viewers skeptical. But the image looks too local and private to be part of a slick campaign to raise awareness about pollution. For now, I’d like to think of it this way: this intimate photo was intended for a limited number of people, but it’s actually addressed to all of us.