A Return To Her Roots

Photographed by her husband Justin Ervin, and surrounded by the golden grasslands of her childhood home in Nebraska, a quarantined Ashley Graham shares moving moments of personal insight, and pens a letter to her newborn son Isaac.

- Lydia Slater

Beautiful, intelligent and a role model for millions, supermodel Ashley Graham has long been a friend of this magazine. Naturally enough, she chose BAZAAR for her first major shoot and interview following the birth of her baby this January.

Then the coronavirus pandemic took hold, and Ashley and her family left New York to quarantine in Nebraska, where she was brought up. Rather than cancel the shoot, we took the unusual step of asking Ashley’s husband, the cinematographer Justin Ervin, if he would take the photographs.

Shot over two days amid the rolling grassland and in the deserted towns near her mother’s home, these intimate pictures of Ashley and her baby Isaac, along with her memories of the past momentous months, are a testament to the eternal joy of family love, and the beauty to be found in the human experience even during an unprecedented crisis. Here, Ashley talks us through some of the milestones in her journey to becoming a mother for the first time.