If you’ve attended or planned a wedding recently, there’s one detail you might have missed: the “Just Married” car. Although writing on the car or tying tin cans to its rear bumper used to be as commonplace as the wedding cake, these days you don’t see too much of it.
Robert E. Jackson is a serious collector of American snapshot photography and has amassed more than 12,000 images in his collection, including eccentric family holiday cards. Jackson’s collection also includes snapshots of cars decorated for weddings.
Jackson said he was drawn to the photos he often finds on eBay because of the ritual they represent. He saw the decorations as a type of folk art and decided to dig deeper to see what else was out there.
“What I found was that the words applied to the car were more creative than I initially imagined,” he wrote. “ ‘Just Married’ isn’t always the standard message on wedding cars. And as one moved into the 1960s and ’70s, the text became more sexual in nature. In an earlier time, the wedding car often emphasized that from this marriage, kids would be produced to enrich the community and create a family. There is more humor in later reiterations of the ‘Just Married’ signage on the car. In the 1930s through ’50s it was often just enough to write ‘Just Married.’ ”
Jackson mentioned that today the ritual has shifted. Many people don’t use a car as a way of leaving the wedding. Instead, they take off in an airplane.
“The car plays a different role in our lives now, and as such there is less emphasis on the wedding car being decorated,” he wrote. “While so much of our lives are public, I think we are more private in the advertising to strangers, via the car, that we are newly married. The ‘Just Married’ vehicle in the past was a humorous way to inform the community that passengers were newly married (when there was a greater sense of belonging to a certain town or community). Now, we post wedding photos stating that fact on social media sites or on a personal wedding website.”
