Beth Garrabrant ’07 still thinks about the dollhouse she stumbled upon at an antique store in South Bend — a piece that would become more than just a prop in her photography classes at Notre Dame. That dollhouse, now a fixture in her Texas home, has followed Garrabrant through the years, woven into a body of work that captures the world of teenage girls. Her career has taken her from documenting scenes from girls’ inner worlds to working on album covers for Taylor Swift.
“Once you’re not young anymore, you look back at these moments and they’re really quite mundane,” she says. “But when I look back there’s sadness, there’s camaraderie, there’s hope for what’s happening next.”
Garrabrant graduated from Notre Dame with majors in studio art and film, television and theater. She then studied at the International Center of Photography in New York City, launching her career in the industry. Recently, her work culminated in a book, Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard, a collaboration with her friends and Notre Dame classmates B.J. Strew and Chau Ngugen, published by Simon & Schuster in November 2024. The collection contains photographs she has taken from high school to the present.
Garrabrant spent her own childhood in Connecticut and Illinois, and her interest in photography started early. Inspired by the black-and-white images of Sally Mann, Garrabrant’s childhood babysitter Katie Dunn began photographing Garrabrant and her sister, capturing them in striking portraits. Those images left a lasting impression, and in high school Garrabrant pursued an independent study in photography, turning the camera on her friends.
At Notre Dame, she reached out to Lou Nanni ’84, ’88M.A., vice president of university relations, with a request to photograph his daughters. She aimed to create images of girlhood that echoed those from her own past. One of those photos became the cover of her new book.
Garrabrant’s fascination with staged worlds led her to use props like dolls and dollhouses, creating scenes that evoke fleeting moments frozen in time.
“For me, the pictures were always more about nostalgia. When I was making them, I was already trying to replicate something that had happened to me before,” she says. “It became this idea of . . . going back, staging these scenes that were familiar to me, that were comforting when I was making them, but also kind of celebrating something that was over.”
She emphasizes that her book is not a documentary of teenagers in America.
“There’s so much to capture about teenagers, and it would be an impossible project to capture it all. I’m not so bold to think that I have. I think that’s what makes teenagers so interesting,” she says.
Many of her photographs capture girls in the spaces they inhabit or offer glimpses into their childhood rooms. In one, a girl stands in her living room wearing her ballet leotard and tights; in another, a girl gets ready for school with her American Girl doll nearby. Others capture scenes without the girls themselves: trophies lined up on a table, awaiting their recipients; a Claire’s storefront under glowing red fluorescent lights.
Nostalgia for the 2000s wouldn’t be complete without Britney Spears, who makes multiple appearances in Garrabrant’s book. One girl’s room features a giant cutout of Spears. Another girl lounges in the grass in an “Oops! . . . I did it again” T-shirt.
As she worked, the photographer considered “types of girls, types of girl’s bedrooms, the world that girls are living in and also how girls fit into pop culture,” she says.
In addition to personal projects and her work for clients that include Disney, Showtime, Netflix and Nike, Garrabrant has collaborated with Taylor Swift since 2020 to create the cover art for such albums as Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department.
Garrabrant notes that her photography and Swift’s lyrics both rely on storytelling and nostalgia to examine life from different angles. “So much of Taylor’s writing is about looking back and reinterpreting and reexamining her own past . . . so there’s certainly parallels there. We are both nostalgic, and we both like looking back and kind of restaging and retelling these stories.”
The first album Garrabrant worked on was Folklore, with its black-and-white cover of Swift standing alone in a misty forest gazing up at the trees. The photos were taken in spring 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was just the two of us making those pictures,” Garrabrant recalls of that morning with Swift. “She did her own hair and wore her own clothes, and we were in the woods. It actually felt like back when I was at Notre Dame, making pictures and using my friends in my projects and shooting all day.”
Garrabrant tries to revisit that creative process with Swift as she approaches new projects.
“It felt very freeing,” she says — less constricted than by the demands of some clients. “It reminded me to remain true to myself and my work.”
Senior Caroline Collins, a senior environmental science major and journalism minor, was this magazine’s autumn intern.