Pryor has a bachelor of arts from University of Michigan and twenty years experience in professional and creative writing with special interest in fiction. In this essay, she examines how Heidi Julavits incorporates the theme of photography into the story of the Sheidegger-Krupnik wedding.

“The camera never lies,” the old saying goes. In Heidi Julavits's “Marry the One Who Gets There First,” the camera may not lie, but everyone else does. The wedding of June Sheidegger and Louis Krupnik is so framed in deceit on all sides that there are no innocent parties, only fellow liars. What many of the characters fail to realize, however, is that they have been lied to not only by their lovers, but also by their own misperceptions and distorted vision.

Julavits structures the story as a series of “outtakes” from the Sheidegger-Krupnik wedding album, but it doesn't take long for the...