Good Boy

Good Boy examines the expectations we inherit through family and the spaces where we learn to belong. Through photographs of my family, domestic interiors, and the objects we keep, I consider how ideas of goodness, masculinity, security, and success become woven into everyday life. As a queer son, I move through these spaces with affection and uncertainty, recognizing both the comfort they offer and the expectations I have struggled to inhabit.

My father’s career in the FBI brings the language of authority and protection into the intimacy of home. Institutional keepsakes sit alongside family photographs, flowers, and childhood souvenirs. These objects hold overlapping histories: public service and private affection, tradition and aspiration. I photograph them as familiar things whose meanings become less settled the longer I look.

Begun in my early twenties and revisited more than a decade later, the project holds two ways of seeing my family together. The earlier photographs emerge from within an inhabited home; later images record emptied rooms, packed belongings, and the traces left behind. Returning to the work, I find that details I once took for granted now carry the weight of change, loss, and inheritance.

The title Good Boy holds tenderness alongside the pressure of approval: the desire to be loved, to make a family proud, and to become the person others imagine. Through these photographs, I ask what it means to carry that desire into adulthood, and how belonging changes as we begin to define a life of our own.