The Golden Child

The Golden Child is an ongoing series of portraits that I began creating while I was in high school. The original “Golden Child” series was a collection of photos in which I covered myself in gold glitter and was portrayed doing “bad” things. I was an only child who had straight A’s, an outgoing personality, and a knack for keeping the indecent things I did covered up. Because of this, I was always my mother’s “Golden child,” but carrying this title left me with a lot of standards that I could not live up to. So, as many teenagers would do, I lied and did what I wanted behind her back. Never in a million years would my mother have imagined that her golden child was experimenting with drugs, practicing premarital sex, or (where most of my guilt back then was rooted from) addicted to cigarettes. I was unable to explain the guilt that I carried to my friends and, for selfish reasons, I would have never told my mother. So I took it out in photographs. After high school my mother and I got much closer. I ended up confessing to her all of the things that I had done, relieving myself of a lot of pent up guilt. Because this series had been my form of coping for so long, it felt right to close the series with an image of my finally washing the glitter off and coming clean.

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