Brides, 2015 - staged fine art photography project

During the decades that followed World War II, many people from the poorest European countries, including my home country, Greece, immigrated to more industrial countries such as the United States, Germany & Australia seeking work and a better life. The first to go where the men, especially the single, unmarried ones which caused a plethora of unmarried young women left behind in the homeland. 

Between the late 40s and 60s, many of these women that came from poor families and had no prospects of "marrying well" in the traditional sense, where sent by their families to the destination countries as "mail-order brides"; to places they knew nothing about, to be married to men they had never met before, carrying only a few pieces of clothing as a token of their previous life and having to build a new one from nothing. 

My project, influenced by stories narrated by my own grandmother who experienced the above first hand, having to host many of her cousins in her paternal house before they boarded the boats to the States. She vividly remembered all the uncertainty, agony and despair sometimes that the young girls felt, the hope for a better life blending with the fear of being so far from the only home they ever knew and the risk of having to share their life with someone that could easily not be good for them. 

The young girls I photographed get transformed in such "Brides" posing with a single item among their possessions that they had to pick, as if it were the only thing they could pack in their luggage to take in their new life.