Dina Goldstein

Ariel - “Here, we have Ariel, who, because she’s so unique and beautiful, has been captured and put on display in an aquarium. We tend to capture beautiful things and use them for our pleasure, and that was really the idea for the shot—the human inclination toward using beautiful creatures for our own entertainment. This project was created with no budget, so I had to do what I had to do to make a picture come together. What I did is I shot the tank separately, photographed Ariel in studio with a green screen, and then we composited the two together.”

Jasmine -  “She’s a soldier and has gone to defend her country, just like so many other women who are on the front lines today. When I shot it, women were in Iraq fighting, which, to me, is amazing. I grew up in Israel and, while women don’t go into combat there, I’ve always seen women with machine guns on the street because they go into the army at age 18. People will laugh, but for the helicopters and tanks, we just photographed some kids toys and superimposed them. We did what we could with the budget!”

Sleeping Beauty - “She’s still sleeping and never woke up, and everyone around her ended up getting old and gray. And the prince kept waiting for her to wake up. My mother works at an old-age home near Vancouver, and a lot of these old people I’ve known forever because I’ve always gone in and visited her.”

Dina Goldstein is a photographer with a very unique series of images called 'Fallen Princesses'. The pictures depict what life would be like for modern day disney characters, it shows them living not so happily every after.

Goldstein says “My daughter was very small and getting into the whole Disney princesses culture, and at the same time my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer (she’s totally fine now),” says Goldstein. “I started to think: what if these princesses had to deal with cancer, or financial discourse, or any of the real-life problems people have to go through?”

It's a very unique idea and I really like it. The images are very effective and it's immediately evident what she is trying to achieve. They clearly show that the characters are living in a modern day world but it's not until you realise they are terribly out of place you begin to question why they are there. The scenarios can all be related to modern day ideas and issues which is quite a strange balance, you have these very real scenes featuring fictional characters leading lives that are influenced by there fairytale story but they all differ quite drastically to the childhood stories.

I think the photographs are quite interesting, especially viewed from the point of view of an adult. It's like the moment you realised you were no longer a child, this seems to be reflected in her photographs and makes you think that nothing you really viewed as a child was that real. Perhaps we were brought up to believe in fairytales, love stories and magic but in the real world none of that is true and in turn it puts the disney princess' out of a job.

Although my view on the photographs is quite grim, the photos themselves are quite bright and heavily focused around the characters. The scene may be quite dreary but the princess' are pretty much always in there bright colour costumes which again links back to childhood.

Overall I really do like this body of work, it's very effective in it's message and quite and original idea that's well delivered and thought out. I like that she has a backstory for each princess/photograph, this is a nice touch that could easily turn into a whole story all together.