A Quinceañera, a party in the celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday in Latin America cultures, is a coming-of-age celebration that traditionally, announces the girl is ready for marriage. It resembles a wedding in scale, significance and cost, and the aesthetic is unique and quite pronounced; fantasy, princess-like, and expensive. Miami has one of the largest Quinceañera photo studio businesses in the world. Often, the party is superfluous and skipped. The photos are important.
Even though Wright is Cuban, she never had a Quince party. Driving by a billboard advertising a Quinceañera photo packages, the artist thinks about why girls in this day and age continue the tradition, and the industry built around it. She makes an appointment at the studio, a one stop-shop Quinceañera photo studio with everything included. At the two-room business on Calle Ocho, the artist answered a series of questions about what she wanted, while keeping authentic to the medium. They do her hair and makeup in typical fashion and tell her to look here, place her hand there, hold this, smile, not smile, etc. After three hours, they chose the best images off the computer and the frame Wright wanted. She was in today’s standards, a Quinceañera.
