Two Fingers in Her Mouth

Both Lily Allen and Lady Gaga had already stripped for i-D by that point—some combination of boredom, publicity hunger, and money will get most people there eventually—so Evan Rachel Wood following suit wasn’t the surprise. How she did it was: lacquer boots, two fingers in her mouth, crawling naked on all fours in front of Terry Richardson’s lens. The kind of shoot that makes you feel something and then feel vaguely complicated about feeling it.

Small breasts were having a moment in the August issue, and I have absolutely no objection to this. There’s a rawness to Wood that glossier work tends to sand away, and Richardson, whatever else you want to say about him, doesn’t sand things down.

I’ve been into Evan Rachel Wood since Thirteen—that film stuck in me in a way most teen-crisis movies don’t, and most of it was her. The fact that she hasn’t had the career that performance deserved is genuinely frustrating. The Manson years are a strange thing to stare at too long—the mental image of him specifically in action on her is the kind of thing that enters your brain and refuses to leave, and not in a good way—but it doesn’t change anything about how I feel watching her work. It rarely does.