Did you own a Barbie and Ken doll while growing up as a child? Remember the conceptual photographer who captured the twisted ending of Disney princesses in her series of photographs titled, “Fallen Princesses”? Well, she did it again with her latest collection of photographs titled, “In The Dollhouse”, featuring our favourite childhood dolls, Barbie and Ken.
In her photographs, Dina Goldstein projects the less than perfect lives of Barbie and Ken, who may have a few too many interests in common. “I’m not a typical mommy and Daddy’s not a typical daddy,” Goldstein relates. “Daddy gets them ready in the morning every day, because Mommy’s sleeping in because Mommy works late. And yet, when they’re playing dolls, Barbie’s cooking in the kitchen and Ken’s going to work. I don’t know where it gets in.”
She decided to find out more about these iconic dolls and is convinced that Ken was definitely never the ladies’ man. “He was always really flamboyant over the years,” she insists. “Mattel has totally, I think, emasculated him. It’s like, come on… I started playing with dolls in my head, and started thinking that this marriage [with Barbie] has been imposed on him, and now he’s just breaking free and breaking loose, and finding his authentic self.”
“It’s not only about questioning gender roles,” explains Goldstein. “It’s also about marriage, about the difficulty of marriage, about authenticity, about the concept of perfect,” said Dina Goldstein about her series of photographs.
Check out her amazing photos which features a story of Barbie discovering Ken’s gay affair:
