Intimate Photos of Amy Winehouse, Without Any Hint of “Doom and Gloom”

There was never any shortage of coverage of Amy Winehouse‘s relationship with her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, whose name she had tattooed on her chest, but the late singer had a lesser-known, deeply significant relationship with another Blake too. Blake Wood, who grew up in Vermont, was 22 when he met a then 24-year-old Winehouse, and it was only a matter of hours before he was staying up late into the night talking to her face-to-face about his breakup and how her album Back to Black, which would win five Grammy Awards the following month, had helped him get through—all while she braided his hair. From then on, they were inseparable, and as they did their best to take refuge from the pitfalls of Winehouse’s newfound fame, including a drug-free retreat to the beaches of Saint Lucia, Wood occasionally paused to pull out his camera. Many of his intimate snapshots, which can now be seen for the first time this week in a new book published by Taschen, were taken at the same time as the constant flood of images that appeared in the tabloids, but in no way do they resemble them; in fact, to Wood, they directly disprove the media’s “doom-and-gloom false narrative.” Take a look at Winehouse as he knew her, here.