I DO, I DO

a past exhibition by Ricco/Maresca Gallery

Love had little to do with marriage in 19th century America. It was a formal contract, often economical, and romance was generally an incidental perk. After photography grew in popularity, the stiff ceremony of the event could be memorialized as a Cabinet Card; a style of portrait photography, mounted on card.

Frank Maresca, co-owner of Chelsea gallery Ricco Maresca, began collecting such cards several years ago. But it wasn’t until he began looking back through the hundred or so he had acquired, that he realized almost all of the couples hailed from Wisconsin. “I said holy cow, there’s something really strange about this,” Maresca tells TIME. “On the surface they were all couples, all from an approximately 20-year period and almost all of these cards are from Wisconsin.” This peculiar coincidence and the strangeness of the cards themselves propelled Maresca to do an exhibition; inviting the public into the strange and decidedly prosaic world of 19th Century newly-weds.

Cabinet cards first exploded in popularity because of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Though the pair got married in the 1840s, they had their wedding painting recreated 14 years later in photographic form. “That photograph by Roger Fenton was widely distributed all over the world,” says Maresca. The young royals were trendsetters of the time, just as celebrities shape contemporary culture today.

- Excerpt from Alexandra Genova’s article in TIME