Dina Goldstein has become a critical and social media sensation since launching her first conceptual photography series, Fallen Princesses. In 2015, Goldstein was awarded the Prix Virginie in Paris – a yearly prize given to the most important female photographer in the world. This is the Foreword for her second book, In The Dollhouse which uses satire and comic book conventions to highlight real world challenges.
EXCERPT
Since her 1959 debut wearing stilettos and a zebra print bikini to the tagline, “a shapely teenage fashion model” and theme song Barbie You’re Beautiful, Barbara Millicent Roberts has been a lightning rod for debate about the socio-cultural expectations for female identity. She certainly looked different from the typical baby-faced dolls of her day. Tall, thin, golden-haired and glossily made up, Barbie was modeled after Lilli, a curvy sexualised doll sold in German bars to adult men based on a racy comic strip character. Equally as buxom, Barbie expressed her personality through her body image, wardrobe and lifestyle. Acquisitive and carefree, Barbie is the glamour girl of a mythic America where being perfect, popular and plastic is the highest ideal. As a corporate-sponsored American princess, Barbie was made to live the dream of a good life.
That’s not Barbie’s fate in Dina Goldstein’s hands.
For her second conceptual series of large-format photographic tableaus, Goldstein subverts the storybook storyline of Barbie and her blow-dried boyfriend Ken. Using the sequential narrative form common to comic books, Goldstein places the long-time couple in a custom-manufactured alternative reality of her own design and decoration. A pink on pink playhouse that seems sweetly perfumed for romance. Even the pillows insist on love. But the candy-coloured interiors and playful appeal of the iconic dolls are Goldstein’s Pop Surrealist lure to engage an audience about serious issues. In The Dollhouse is social documentary photography masquerading as a puppet show. The series of 10 panels unfolds a tragicomic tale of the perils of being plastic and the potential for salvation through authenticity. Barbie gets the short end of that stick – in Goldstein’s telling of her story, she endures psychological dysfunction, an emotional breakdown, a really bad haircut and, ultimately, decapitation.
Life wasn’t supposed to be this hard for Barbie.
Shaped into Barbie’s form – and all her fabulous clothes – is the cultural expectation that her life is charmed. She is the ultimate material girl meant to have it all – iconic beauty, gravity-defying breasts, salon-perfect hair, wafer-thin waistline, any job that she wants and a boyfriend content to live in her shadow for more than 50 years. From her proportions to her wardrobe, Barbie sets an impossible standard for girls and the grown women they become. With over a billion sold and the average girl owning at least 8 Barbies, developmental psychologists indicate the dolls plays an active role in shaping a young girl’s self-image. Arguably, Barbie’s a tool in the hand teaching females that appearance and material possessions matter for achieving social status. And, possibly, a gateway drug to a lifelong obsession over what it takes to fit the ideal of feminine beauty.
Dina Goldstein’s photography projects have made her an iconoclast in fantasyland. Her acclaimed series Fallen Princesses recontextualized Disnified heroines to engage awareness about societal challenges: pollution, war, obesity, marital dysfunction. As with In The Dollhouse, Goldstein draws from her earlier photodocumentary work and her keen ability to find the fragmented truth in a story no matter the setting. Goldstein’s scenes are no longer happened upon but now diligently arranged though the artifice is still meant to be cut from the coarse cloth of social reality. As a surrealist, Goldstein knows that beneath the smooth, polished surface of our pop cultural age, the truth is writhing to be set free. Her work is intended to – and does – provoke debate. It’s intentionally theatrical but has an honest message. Every image is queerly compelling…
