The Photographs Before the Fall

When Amy Winehouse died I wasn’t surprised, and that was the worst part of it. Surprise would have been survivable. Instead there was just a dull confirmation of something you’d been watching come true for years, and underneath that, the real grief—for the music, for the voice, for whatever she would have made next.

Her records don’t feel dated. Frank still sounds like someone picking a fight with herself, and Back to Black still sounds like the aftermath of a war. Those aren’t ordinary things to pull off. Most music from that era has been quietly retired into nostalgia playlists. Winehouse gets listened to—really listened to—because the emotion in it was never decorative. It was the entire point.

Photographer Charles Moriarty knew her before the machinery of fame had fully taken hold, and his book Before Frank collects those images. She looks young in them—which she was—and unburdened, which she wouldn’t be for long. There’s something painful about early photographs of people who don’t survive their own celebrity. You look at the face and you can already see what it doesn’t know yet.