The photographer Beth Garrabrant was born in 1985 in Lake Forest, Illinois, 30 miles north of Chicago. This affluent suburb, with its stately homes, served as the backdrop for Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, his 1980 film about the crumbling of a cookie-cutter family. John Hughes, another director, lived up the street. His films Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club depicted life in the fictional town of Shermer, Illinois—closely modeled on Lake Forest.
Today, most know Garrabrant as the photographer for Taylor Swift’s recent albums Folklore and The Tortured Poets Department. And while she now lives in Austin, Texas, she often ponders her upbringing. “I am always careful when I talk about Lake Forest,” Garrabrant told AnOther Magazine this week, “because it is a very comfortable place to live, but it was also a town that had a lot of darkness. Every year there were tragic accidents or deaths in strange circumstances.... It attracts a very strange energy.”
