DINA GOLDSTEIN: ANALYZING THE HUMAN CONDITION

With more than 20 years of photography experience, Vancouver based photographer Dina Goldstein devotes herself to creating meaningful images with a distinctive, individual, and artistic point of view.

From her twenties to her early thirties, Goldstein photographed non-stop in differing capacities. She travelled to war-torn areas. She worked as a staff photographer on a Vancouver weekly newspaper and began concentrating on editorial portraiture. She shot images for many Canadian, American, and European newspapers and magazines. She photographed commercial projects with advertising agencies in Vancouver and collaborated with art directors internationally.

Storytelling has always been central to Goldstein’s work. As a documentary photographer, Goldstein created and shared a variety of stories such as Palestinians in Gaza, gamblers at the racetrack in Vancouver, East Indian blueberry farmers in British Columbia, show dogs, bodybuilders at state championships, and teenagers dirty dancing at a bar mitzvah.

Influenced by the 1998 exhibit Pop Surrealism at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Goldstein expanded her visual language to include narratives, symbolism, dark humour, and subversive messaging. With this new vocabulary, her work deepened. She analyzed the human condition and interpreted new and cliched notions of beauty, gender, sex, and religion through the lens of pop culture, which concerns itself with the ordinary and superficial, and surrealism, which mines dreams and the unconscious.