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.”
In 2001, still in Lake Forest, Garrabrant began documenting her privileged, prim, yet sinister teenage life. In 2005, she left to study photography—first in Indiana, at the University of Notre Dame, then in New York, at the International Center of Photography.
After graduation, while traveling across the country, Garrabrant photographed schools, churches, kitchens, and bedrooms that embody suburban living. One such picture shows a school stairwell with inspirational phrases on each step: the first reads, I won’t do it; then, Yes, I did it! Her images always leave room for ambiguity. That lone blonde girl in a prom dress with a blue corsage, is she waiting for a date? That group of young women in polished suits and high heels, why do they have their backs to us? “It is mostly me trying to recreate scenes that I remember from growing up,” Garrabrant has explained.
She finished working on the series in 2017 and now presents 52 of the photographs in her first book, Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard. Since 2001, when she began shooting in Lake Forest, much has happened. The Twin Towers fell; George W. Bush waged war on Iraq; a global financial crisis rocked the world; Trump roared into power. All the while, suburban America chugged quietly on.
“From Garrabrant’s vantage point,” film director Kelly Reichardt writes in the book’s introduction, “all seems well in the heartland. Instead of a ruckus country on the brink of war with itself, here is a sense of continuity, the steady pulse of day-to-day living.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail
