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When it was reported that pop singer Demi Lovato had potentially overdosed on heroin, a particular digital gasp quickly made its way around the Internet. We’re used to seeing images of bright young things spilling out of clubs and into cabs, the cocktails and bottle service, even cocaine, that perennial party drug, all cheekily implied (and now there is also the ubiquitous vape). But heroin is the problem of regular people, poor people, albeit at epidemic levels: in Camden, New Jersey, and Burlington, Vermont; Billings, Montana, and Baltimore. The idea, almost certainly fantasy, of Lovato shooting up in her Hollywood Hills mansion was more sordid than anything anyone had yet to understand about her addiction.
It only took a day for articles to pop up with another name in their headlines: Amy Winehouse, who has been tethered posthumously to the drug in a way that she actually wasn’t at the end of her life, despite enduring misconceptions. In 2011, Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning, her body weakened from years of bulimia and past heroin addiction. But she had been clean from the drug when she passed away; she had kicked drugs. When news of Lovato’s overdose broke, British tabloid the Mirror dug through footage in her Simply Complicated documentary to find a moment she had “admitted” to “idolizing tragic Amy Winehouse.” Another Mirror story advertises: “Demi Lovato staggers out of Hollywood nightclub in last photos before singer’s ‘heroin’ overdose.”
Blake Wood was a friend of Winehouse’s at the peak of her own “staggers out of” heyday: He met her at the beginning of 2008, after the release of her megahit album Back to Black. He was a 22-year-old photographer from Vermont who had spent a year in New York documenting his social circle: friends in fashion, music, and art. He arrived in London at the home of Kelly Osbourne, where he met Winehouse, then 24, a loudmouth north London foil to his soft-spoken, sober shyness, and the two formed an immediate close relationship. Wood spent the next two years documenting one of the most tumultuous periods in Winehouse’s life—and his—and has, 10 years later, released a portion of these images in a book, Amy Winehouse, published by Taschen. They are about as far away from paparazzi photos as you could possibly get.
“I put that part of my life away,” Wood says of why the images lingered in the back of a closet before he decided to publish them. He left London in November 2009, after nearly two years with Amy, as her Good Blake—her Bad Blake is the notorious Blake Fielder-Civil, her husband and eventual ex-husband, who admitted he introduced her to heroin, and with whom Winehouse was once papped in the street, bloodied and high. A trip to London a few years ago inspired Good Blake to dig up his work from those times. “I realized that it was something that needs to exist in the world. During her life, there were so many times that she was treated so poorly by media. This is a way for me to continue to fight for her.”
The majority of photographs in Amy Winehouse are from a lesser-known period in the heady five years between Winehouse’s lightening-fast ascendence to superstardom and her death, when she, Wood, and a few others moved to the island of St. Lucia for six months in a bid to get the singer clean. It was after a disastrous performance at a music festival on the Isle of Wight in September of 2008 that Winehouse decided she needed to stop taking drugs. “We got to just hang,” Wood says of the extended vacation, in which they rode horses, spent time with locals, and swam in the ocean. There were no paparazzi, except for a few that occasionally took pictures of the star from the water.
Wood’s photos from St. Lucia are surreally peaceful; Winehouse lets her curly, short hair free from under her usual beehive, wears little of the heavy wing-tipped eye makeup she was known for, and runs around in jeans and a bikini top. The colors are bright but soft—greens from palm trees, gray-blue water. Winehouse poses naturally and playfully; she looks happy. The book’s soft white cover, with a portrait of Winehouse looking nearly regal on horseback, serves to physically encase her in a world entirely opposite from the one she can’t escape—even now—in the papers: of dark back-alleys, stage doors, backseats of taxies, and hard cobblestoned streets. We know from the other seminal documentary of Winehouse’s life, Asif Kapadia’s Amy (which Wood contributed to but about which he has some reservations) that there were a few more sinister undercurrents to the trip. Winehouse was drinking heavily, and her father accompanied her eventually with his own film crew, who were making a television documentary about him and his famous daughter despite her desire to stay out of the public eye. Still, the feeling of some kind of magic persists in the images.
“She was so multifaceted,” Wood says. “She was like eight different people in one, but they all coexisted, and they all were her.” There are glimpses of Winehouse’s playful side on the island; in one particularly striking set, Wood captured various stages of Winehouse’s beloved, full-throated laugh, as she stands on the beach in a high-piled ponytail, long acrylic nails, and a yellow bikini. Like a flag, the towering beehive symbolizes Winehouse’s performative side, an echo of other images peppered throughout of some of her most iconic performances (in good and bad ways) for which Wood was present. We see her performing at the Fendi store opening in Paris in 2008 and applying lipstick in the mirror under a less-than-subtle blonde wig, her attempt at pub camouflage. There are a few shots from Isle of Wight’s Bestival: “She wasn’t really in a place where she should be [performing],” Wood remembers. “I definitely learned a lot from that experience, seeing how the crowd was glued to her and that energy and what that was like for her.”
In many ways, Winehouse was the perfect target for the cutthroat British press in its booming, relentless phone-hacking phase: She wasn’t a nice girl. “He left no time to regret / Kept his dick wet” go the first two rather bawdy lines of “Back to Black,” despite its Lesley Gore–inflected doo-wop stylings. Her tattoos, her tiny shorts and tiny dresses, Bad Blake: She was a bad seed in a bland boy band landscape, and they loved and hated her for it. Combined with her preternatural, jaw-dropping talent, she was both the beauty and the beast, and footage in Amy of Winehouse being jeered at, hounded, and physically intimidated by photographers is, according to Wood, a tenth of what she experienced daily.
It’s hard not to imagine how Winehouse’s life might have benefitted from social media, which democratized intimate and candid photos of celebrities by putting control back in their hands, literally. The rise of Instagram missed her only by a few years. “I think we’re now at a point where we’re having to be a little bit more liable in media, in what we do and what we say,” Wood tells me. “Part of the bigger picture in this book is the media’s role in how we treat each other and how we talk to each other, especially women.” But have we really learned that much, when we’ve turned even more aspects of our lives into content?
Nancy Jo Sales, who contributed the text for Wood’s book, felt a closeness to Winehouse, another “Jewish girl who grew up in a household where her parents loved classic jazz singers like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan.” When she died, it signified, to Sales, “the death of a young woman who had been, in part, dragged down by factors that so many young women suffer from: self-esteem issues, body-image issues, an experience with an abusive ex, people trying to control her. Amy suffered under many of the things young women go through under misogyny, although she might not have talked about it that way.”
The rush to connect Lovato, who recovered from her overdose (which sources insist was not caused by heroin) to Winehouse hints at our desire to make these young lives seem doomed. It keeps the public from reflecting on the role we play in consuming their suffering, whether laundered through the women themselves via their own Instagram feeds, through the lenses of jostling photographers, or in their own lyrics. Wood’s book liberates Winehouse from the idea that she sealed her own fate: “It wasn’t like she just was in a tailspin going downwards, like a plane crash. There was amazing personal triumph during the last four years.”
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