Thirteen Was Half a Lifetime Ago

Ryan McGinley shoots bodies the way good landscape photographers shoot light—as though the generosity is the point, the camera grateful for whatever it’s given. His Vanity Fair shoot with Miley Cyrus in the California desert has that quality: she moves through expensive clothes that don’t cover much, and then around the campfire she isn’t in anything at all, and the whole sequence feels less like a magazine assignment and more like documentation of something that actually happened somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Samira Nasr handled styling, and several of the shots feature Marc Jacobs’ spring collection worn with the careless confidence of someone who grew up on camera. She’s been in front of lenses since she was thirteen—that was her first season of Hannah Montana, half her life ago now. I felt like America’s nanny, she told Vanity Fair’s Zach Baron in the piece accompanying the images, describing what it felt like to carry that kind of influence over children while still being a child herself. Whether that was a good idea is a question she seems to have been sitting with ever since.

The shoot happened a few months after the California wildfires took her house. She’d also just married Liam Hemsworth, which generated its own cycle of commentary from people with strong opinions about what a pansexual woman should do with her private life. Sometimes I’m surprised by my own decisions, she told Baron. Sometimes I think: Why the hell did I do that? Or: What brought me here? It’s the most self-aware thing anyone has said about celebrity since forever, and it landed from someone topless around a campfire in the desert, which somehow makes it more credible rather than less. She’s twenty-six. She’ll probably keep surprising herself.