Destiny's Shiny Bracelet

They are runaways from broken homes with parents who don’t know what to do. Two American teens, caught in a tentative clasp, naked except for that bracelet, holding on to each other for dear life. They seem to exist outside of time; there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, only now and the pure comfort of this awkward moment that brings them together.

Destiny and Napoleon have been wakened abruptly from nightmares of big homes and fast cars. Their new shelter, a squat under the Hollywood Freeway, is noisy and dangerous, and they live day by day in this underground warren teeming with kids and their exploiters. Destiny stares off into space, as the photographer’s flash cascades off Napoleon’s back, catching her bracelet brightly glinting like the mirror ball above the dancers at her senior prom. This fractured rainbow of light symbolizes her broken dreams. As in a 1920s fashion photo, a kaleidoscope of light reflected from the bracelet holds the center of the picture, joining these two lost souls in a timeless embrace.

Destiny’s Shiny Bracelet, made in 1989 with Polaroid positive/negative film, is from Raised by Wolves—an expansive, ten-year project completed in 1995 that documents the lives of runaway teenagers in San Francisco and Hollywood. Goldberg involved the communities of people he photographed in his creative process—kids, parents, cops, social workers, and street people—by incorporating their perceptions into his work. He asked them to respond by writing, drawing, photographing, and sometimes marking on his pictures. They also contributed stories, diaries, and actual objects, helping to create an interactive experience.

In Destiny’s Shiny Bracelet, we see Destiny through her own eyes. She is looking for help, but at the same time she is pushed by Napoleon up against an impenetrable backdrop of concrete, etched with graffiti poems: “4 Go Luve,” she seems to scream. The metaphor of the conqueror shoving providence up against the wall is a universal one, yet in Goldberg’s photograph the bracelet is her radiance, a gift that allows her to survive his attack.