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October 16, 2009
Disney heroines as real women
Photographer envisions what life is like for princesses following the happily ever after.
JOSHUA SPIRO
Walt Disney movies are practically synonymous with happy endings: the villain is dispatched, there is often a wedding much like in Shakespearean comedies, the small woodland creatures and endearing inanimate objects cluster around the happy couple, the violins swell and the credits roll. But how picturesque is the "happily ever after" if you fast forward 20 years? That's the question posed by photographer Dina Goldstein's series titled Fallen Princesses.
Goldstein, a former photographer for the Jewish Independent, describes the project as a parallel world where she topped off the fairy tale endings with the question, "What if?" For example, after Belle from Beauty and the Beast marries her prince, Goldstein envisioned a growing dissatisfaction for the bookish, beautiful heroine. "She'd probably get bored living in that big castle, and she was always so used to being beautiful and eventually she would lose her beauty," Goldstein said in an interview with the Independent. Then "she would do what everybody does these days and have plastic surgery."
But there was more to the genesis of the project than idle conjecture about what happens after the end of a fairy tale. Goldstein conceived of the project a year and a half ago when her daughter was first getting into dress-up and princesses and her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
"These two events kind of correlated and I started thinking about princesses and happy endings and what life is really like," she said, "and all the challenges a lot of people I know have [faced], a lot of women especially." One of Goldstein's photographs depicts a shorn Rapunzel sitting on a hospital bed with her hair beside her and an intravenous line running out of her arm.
Part of the reason the project was so long in the making is because Goldstein was funding it herself, squeezing it in between her commercial photography work and raising her children. And for her, it's been worth the wait. "I'm happy with each photo that I put out and that's without having a huge budget, without being Annie Leibovitz," and being able to spring for any costume, actor or location for a shoot, she said.
Goldstein applied for a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, but when she didn't get it, she found a way to realize her vision nonetheless. She got locations donated and found make-up artists and models willing to volunteer their time. She had to always keep her eyes out to make sure she found the perfect woman to portray the princess. "Cinderella was a hostess in a restaurant, and Snow White was a guest at a wedding that I shot, and Ariel [from The Little Mermaid] was a model at a fashion show." But serendipity didn't always play its part and sometimes Goldstein would go to malls just to sit and scout.
While it was no surprise to Goldstein that each shot would be a big production, the Snow White photo, which involved six children and a dog, was especially hard to manage. She was shocked by the volume of responses her photos drew when she first posted them on the website of the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) to get some feedback. Blogs around the world picked up on the series and Goldstein's professional website crashed under the load of as many as 10,000 visitors a day.
The online exposure also alerted her to controversies she hadn't anticipated. In another of her photos, Goldstein shows a version of Little Red Riding Hood who is not so little anymore. The photo was intended to highlight the problem of obesity in our society, but Goldstein admitted, "a lot of people were offended that I put McDonald's in the basket that she's taking to grandma."
Another photograph that drew negative reactions was one of Jasmine from Aladdin backed by a helicopter- and tank-filled desert, decked out in ammunition belts, purple camouflage and holding a big gun. Some people thought she had made the Arabian princess into a terrorist, but Goldstein contends she was simply playing with the idea of "what if Jasmine became a soldier like so many women who are on the front line today?"
The reason Goldstein is fascinated with fairy tales begins, once upon a time, in Israel. "In Israel, when I was growing up, there weren't a lot of fairy tales," she explained, "but there are now. I've been recently and Disney's everywhere." Goldstein's family moved to Vancouver when she was eight and, growing up, she was exposed to stories from the Torah and Talmud-based tales, but nothing quite like the modern-day folklore her daughter is growing up with today.
Goldstein has been doing photography for about 17 years, but Fallen Princesses is the first personal project she has done in a while. Her last such endeavor was called Track Record and it involved spending two years photographing regulars at the Vancouver racetrack. That series was more in line with her forte; she acknowledged she is "used to doing more journalistic, more documentary work. [Fallen Princesses involved] actually putting together a story." Despite the narrative aspect of her current series being a new direction for her, the common thread with Goldstein's past work is her fastidiousness and her desire to find the perfect subjects.
Though it only just opened, Goldstein's series has already garnered awards and critical attention. The series received the International Color Award for Fine Arts and her Snow White and Rapunzel photos will be featured in the American Photography Journal, after being reviewed by a number of photo critics, including Kathy Ryan of the New York Times. The series has nine pictures in it so far and, at the gallery, they will be enlarged to 40-by-60 inches.
When asked whether the social commentaries in her series are an overly morbid picture of our world, Goldstein said, "I think it's got a dark sense of humor. I don't think it's necessarily pessimistic; it's realistic."
Fallen Princesses will be on display at the Buschlen Mowatt Gallery until Nov. 15. For more information, visit buschlenmowatt.com. View images from the exhibit at fallenprincesses.com.
Joshua Spiro is a freelance writer living in New York.
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