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When Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel,any remaining illusions I had of charmed lives for princesses did too. I was a teenaged Anglophile, one of the millions who woke up extra early to watch her wedding day on tv, and felt real sadness - whether I should have or not - in the years after as that initial
fairy tale story crumbled.
There it was. Princesses - at least one,anyway - marry people who don't love them all that much, or at least not enough to cut ties with his ex-girlfriend. She gets an eating disorder and never quite gets over her parents' divorce. She goes through a series of bad relationships and then ends up unthinkably dead in a traffic tunnel. And this when it seems, only just seems, that she might be beyond the worst part of the learning curve.
I'm tempted to sugar-coat this as some kind of life lesson but I fail miserably at that, which may be why Dina Goldstein's Fallen Princesses photo series remains very much on my mind, a week after I saw it for the first time on the JPG Magazine site.
Even Cinderella's coach breaks down in a sketchy neighborhood. All images brilliantly shot by and courtesy of Dina Goldstein.
Goldstein takes princesses - the Disney versions, this time - and depicts what may have happened after the closing credits. Cinderella's hitching because she got drunk in a dive bar. Snow White looks miserable with a house full of children. And in the ones that hurt me to look at the most, Rapunzel holds her wig of long braids during chemotherapy, and Belle lies on an operating table during a plastic surgery procedure.
As a strictly in-the-moment shooter who knows and chooses not to take on the work that goes into studio photography, I'm impressed with Goldstein's work on a technical level and also of any use of photography to intentionally comment on larger issues. It's one of its most important uses, I think.. In Goldstein's words on JPGMag.com:
As a young girl, growing up abroad, I was not exposed to Fairy tales.
These new discoveries lead to my fascination with the origins of Fairy tales. I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues.
Now, despite what any Facebook quiz would have me think, I am not any kind of Disney princess, unless upcoming releases include Princess Who Swears-a-lot, or @Laurie of Twitterlandia. I grew up in the generation after the classics were released - Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella, and they really didn't work for me. I was honestly freaked out even at an early age by the recurring theme of women needing to pass out for indeterminate periods of time in order for things to get better. No thank you. I was way into 101 Dalmations and Mary Poppins, stuff like that, and if anything really scarred me for life it was Bambi.
Real life has not been princessy either. Issues, I have issues. Externally, weight gain, a congenital facial scar, eyeglasses, unfortunate spiral perms. Internally, a crazy penchant for overanalysis and an occasional attitude problem. You name it, I got it. For more appropriate pop culture references, I was Winona Ryder in Heathers, minus the Christian Slater killer boyfriend, or Janeane Garofalo to my best friend's Uma Thurman in the Truth About Cats and Dogs. I maybe passed out sometimes, but there was no guy standing over me at the end crying. (And if there was, he needed money for the tab.)
Now that's just a cheap parenthetical joke. But the truth is, I've been jealous of women whose lives have appeared to be more charmed, more princessy than mine, at least aesthetically. I've thought that real-life girls who were popular, and pretty, and consistently boyfriended, were better off than me.
That's the truth. Sometimes I thought it because they strongly insinuated it, or because social interactions made me feel that way. Or maybe I thought it because of music videos, or movies with impossibly happy endings that looked nothing like my life (or to be honest, anyone's I knew, but we all kind of live in our
