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One of the weird realities of the 21st century is that being brilliant in a hyper-creative field like photography is often no longer good enough if you hope to make a living. Dina Goldstein saw that sea change coming early.
As noted in her new book XXX, the Vancouver-based photographer became obsessed with taking pictures at the end of her teens. It’s a career she didn’t predict for herself growing up.
“I was a theatre kid,” she notes in an extended interview with the Straight, in advance of an appearance at the Jewish Book Festival. “So acting — that’s what I thought I was going to do. I was actually in the first episode of 21 Jump Street — the pilot episode. I was a very highly paid background performer with one line. I can’t even remember what that line was, but in the scene we were all sitting around a drama class at Eric Hamber where it was filmed. That was my high school.”
Interrupting plans to follow series star Johnny Depp onto bigger and better things was a life-changing trip to the Sinai Desert. Goldstein touched down overseas with a point-and-shoot borrowed from her aunt. She came home in love with the idea of documenting experiences on film. Eventually, that turned into a freelance photography career which paid well and kept her busy. Until it didn’t. One day, Goldstein had top-tier newspapers and magazine publications across the country running her work. And then came a seismic shift that changed everything.
“I was making a good living,” Goldstein reminisces. “And then what happened was the digital revolution. Basically, the jobs that were offered at birth were suddenly depleted. It was obviously because everyone had their digital cameras, and so photography became easier for people — they didn’t have to know their technical stuff, and so there were suddenly a lot more shooters out there available. And art directors started shooting their own pictures. I started recognizing at this point that the value of photography was flailing.”
So she reinvented herself. But, in doing so, Goldstein always remembered what got her to where she is today.
“I call it the Holy Trinity, she says. “I’ve got the portraiture, the street photography, and the tableau.”
And that’s kind of where XXX starts: as a tribute to a creative world she came from and still inhabits today.
“I just like to grab my camera, go out in the world, or go out into my neighbourhood — East Vancouver — and document,” Goldstein shares. “There’s so much out there. It keeps me fresh, and it keeps me in touch with what’s going on.”
THE IDEA FOR XXX came to Goldstein during the pandemic. Like many of us, she found herself with time on her hands. She also found herself thinking about the thousands and thousands of pictures she’d shot over the years, many of which were sitting in storage in her studio, forgotten even by her.
One of the great things about photographs is the way they serve as reference points for one’s own past. Looking through film negatives and old prints, Goldstein was at first reminded of her own childhood memories, where she’d hit a bookstore on Granville Street and be fascinated by a book series, titled Photo Annual, which collected photos from past eras.
“These are books that I still have at my studio — annuals from the ’30s and ’40s,” she says. “That’s what I kind of based my book on. They published the books every year, and it was just a black cover with the date on it, and that was it. Then, inside, were all the yummies.”
Striking Goldstein about those photos is the power of images that are shot on film — a medium she still loves best.
“Film has character,” she says succinctly. “It can say, ‘Hi — I’m very bright and colourful and contrasty.’ Or ‘I’m very subtle, and so are my colours.’ Each film has a character. With digital, you are putting the character in.”
Her love of shooting on film comes honestly.
After coming out of journalism school at Langara College — where she designed her own curriculum to reflect her interest in photography — Goldstein got her start in community newspapers in 1993 as a staffer at Vancouver’s Jewish Western Bulletin. In just a decade she became a go-to freelancer for some of the city’s most respected publications, shooting covers and feature stories for Vancouver Magazine, BCBusiness, Vancouver Sun, and, yes, The Georgia Straight. There were also paid gigs for media outlets across North America — a week after 9/11 she was sent to New York to document first responders.
As the ’00s progressed, long-running media empires began to see sudden and steep declines in revenue as advertisers jumped ship to the Internet, leaving little money to hire freelancers. And, as Goldstein notes, suddenly you didn’t have to have mastered f-stops or know what to set your flash at in low light to take a usable photograph.
“I didn’t know what the future was going to be like with digital cameras and everyone being able to photograph,” she offers. “Not everybody can take a good picture — I can 100 percent tell you that — but it was definitely made easier. So I saw this coming, and said to myself, ‘I think if I want to survive in this industry I need to create work that comes from my brain, that is personal, and that I can only do because it’s not easily achievable.’ ”
So she did, pivoting towards large-scale, multi-year narrative photography projects, starting with Fallen Princesses in 2009. That 10-part series — which sprung out of her young daughter’s fascination with Disney princesses — found Goldstein reimagining classic fairy-tale characters for more complicated times. In meticulously planned and staged photos, Snow White was recast as an overwhelmed housewife, tending to a brood of diaper-clad kids in a nondescript home while her Prince Charming watches sports. Cinderella was seen alone in a dingy watering hole surrounded by grizzled barflies, looking dejected, disillusioned, and generally disappointed by life while clutching a half-drunk beer.
“The internet was fairly new back then, and I put it up on a magazine called jpeg.com,” Goldstein shares. “It was for my own community because it was a community site — kind of like, ‘Love what you’re doing!’ When I loaded Fallen Princesses, suddenly two days later the whole thing went viral, and I had every newspaper in the world calling me to publish the pictures. That success allowed me to move onto another project. It was like, ‘Okay — this is working’, so I continued on. And now I’m eight projects in.”
That includes her most recent series, the just-released MISTRESSPIECES, in which Goldstein uses famous historical women to draw attention to the pressing issues of the 21st century. The woman in Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring is seen standing on a beach littered with plastic waste. Looking computer-generated, and standing amidst a sea of phone screens, Marilyn Monroe is used as a springboard for examining AI. Such pieces are, quite intentionally, not included in XXX. After all, the goal in the book is in many ways to showcase where Goldstein came from, not where she’s positioned herself today.
For the past decade, her work has been shown in galleries around the world, purchased by collectors, and analyzed by academics. God-given talent is, of course, at the core of an ascension that now has her mentioned with Lotusland giants like Fred Herzog, Jeff Wall, and Stan Douglas. Many shooters tend to focus their energies on one area — portraiture, fashion, food, street, or concert photography. The danger of that was driven home in the middle of the 2000s when work started to dry up as budgets shrunk at media outlets, particularly ones hanging on to print.
Goldstein has always believed that one has to be able to pivot and adapt if they want to remain part of the conversation. So even though her energies have shifted over the past few decades, XXX serves as a tribute to what first made her fall in love with photography. That includes interacting with everyday people in their own milieus, whether it’s Lynchian-looking regulars at the Hastings Racecourse, everyday Americans at a roadside diner in California, or a slum-dwelling family in Mumbai.
“The camera gives you strength and courage,” she offers. “So I just go up to people, because I love how extraordinary and diverse people are.”
GOLDSTEIN CHEEKILY NOTES that she’s well aware what the title XXX will bring to mind.
“I even wrote in the book, ‘This is not a dirty book,'” Goldstein says with a big laugh. “That’s just my sense of humour. XXX stands for three decades — the ’90s, the 2000s, and the 2010s. That’s the way that I split up the archives and kept the photos together in groups.”
Travelling remains a lifelong passion; her path to photography can be directly traced to that early exploration of the Sinai Desert with her aunt’s point-and-shoot, and the thrill of getting the film developed. So it’s not surprising that XXX works as a celebration of the joy of discovering new places, customs, and cultures, some familiar and kitsch-cool (Times Square during the peep-show years, fantastically tacky Vegas), some thrillingly exotic (Man with Donkey is shot in the shadow of the pyramids in Giza, Egypt; Marina Scene transports us to the docks of Istanbul; Woman in Window captures the quieter side of Venice, Italy.) Her favourite photo in the book is Barbershop Circumcision, which is shot in Jerusalem and, if you look closely, captures a scene where haircuts are only one of the services offered.
Consider the collection — which includes essays written by both Goldstein and her peers — a document of a life lived fascinatingly, the photos showcasing an endless curiosity about the planet we live on.
What also bleeds through her XXX shots is a genuine love of her fellow human beings. For historians, there are shots of the famous (Bill Clinton, Douglas Coupland, Nardwuar the Human Serviette), and shots of a Vancouver that no longer exists (a couple stands looking into a long-shuttered Downtown Eastside pawn shop in B.C. Collateral.)
Arguably the most captivating photos are ones of everyday people. To spend a minute with them is to wonder what their stories might be: the Abbotsford blueberry pickers of Group of Workers in Field, the trophy-clutching Cloverdale Rodeo tyke in Little Cowboy, and a Dominican Republic sex worker holding a picture of Jesus for Prostitute.
The message behind XXX then is maybe this: there’s a beautiful world out there, so don’t be afraid to explore it, celebrating both the commonalities and the differences you might have with your fellow human beings. In doing so, you might learn something.
“I hope people are entertained by the photos, and that they discover things that they didn’t know about that brings a smile to their face,” she says. “I hope that it brings that kind of happy, analogue feeling we miss so much, and are so desperate for and don’t get with digital. It’s something tangible.”
And maybe, XXX might also serve as a roadmap for anyone who needs a reminder to always remain curious about whatever their passions are.
“I can do anything,” she says proudly. “Put a camera in front of me, and I can do it. You have to be that person here in Vancouver. You can’t be like they were in New York — ‘Oh, I specialize in this, or I specialiize in that.’ And those that did never grew.”
And if you find yourself inspired by XXX to pick up a camera and start documenting the world around you — maybe even using film — then the book has done its job. Let Dina Goldstein be your guiding unicorn.
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