Amanda Petrusich on Katy Grannan’s {Photograph} of Taylor Swift

There’s one thing uncanny about this nonetheless and gorgeous portrait of a twenty-one-year-old Taylor Swift, shot by Katy Grannan for Lizzie Widdicombe’s Profile of the singer, in 2011. Swift was already enormously well-known (“Fearless,” from 2008, gained a Grammy for Album of the Year; “Speak Now,” launched in 2010, bought greater than 1,000,000 copies in its first week), however she hadn’t but grow to be the thing of such fervent and unwavering curiosity that she needed to maintain her hand over her mouth when she spoke in public, lest she ship a nation of lip-readers right into a frenzy. Looking at this picture is like seeing an image of your self taken simply earlier than one thing seismic occurred: perhaps you met a fantastic love, or discovered you had been having a child, or misplaced somebody. There’s your smiling face, perpetually moored within the Before.

Did Swift sense what was coming? Maybe. She has all the time been savvy about cultural wishes. Certain features of her life have modified dramatically previously fourteen years, however the grand theme of her work has remained the identical. As she informed Widdicombe, she is concerned about “love, and unrequited love, and love that didn’t last, or love that you wish had lasted, or love that never even got started.” At the time, Swift was starting to imagine a extra difficult view of romance—Widdicombe factors to the lyric “There’s a drawer of my things at your place” as proof of extra grownup themes. Swift continues to be in tune with the tenderness of a brand new love affair, however she is much less Pollyannaish, singing about intercourse and heartache with ease. Young Swift possessed a type of guilelessness, however the thirty-six-year-old model has seen issues, felt issues, been harm. It has made her solely extra compelling. ♦