A wedding of soul and body

By Drew Halfnight

At about 10 a.m. this morning at the World Press Photo exhibit in Toronto's BCE Place, I saw a portrait photograph of a couple on their wedding day.

The girl looked radiant in her youth in her white embroidered dress, and yet, a bit distant and melancholy.

The man was a shock to the eye. Earless, hairless, burnt all over, his head was a ruined knub. He stood angled toward the woman wearing a brigadier's uniform, gold buttons to the collar. His eye aimed past the bride's chest and to the floor.

The photograph by American Nina Berman won first prize for portrait singles at the exhibit.

A stout middle-aged lady approached and told me "they pretty much rebuilt the face," adding that the soldier in the picture had undergone 19 operations of reconstructive surgery after a bomb went off in his face in Iraq.

His Chicago-born fiancee, Renee Kline, stayed with him for a year while he convalesced in Texas.

After looking at the life-sized face of Renee, I jotted down the words "TWO EYES--one open wide, the other more closed."

So much hope, despair, anticipation and dread read in their faces and their postures.

There seemed to be a storm-cloud behind them in the portrait. The dark gray-blue studio drapery in the background of the photo looked like the overcast sky in an impressionist painting.

The photograph was disturbing. The formal portrait setting jarred with the bald reality of war applied to the skull of the man, whose name was Ty Ziegel.

The exhibit is located in the coroporate collonade between lower Bay Street to Yonge, where magnificent white arches are aligned like ribs overhead. People swirl by, many stop to look.

There are dead children pictured, and mutilated faces, it is an intense scene. The tall business men stoop and lean in their immaculate suits.

The noise of the photographs is absorbed into the cathedralesque steel-and-glass vaulting.

The exhibit can be seen Until October 24, every day from seven a.m. to 10 p.m.