Before fame and drugs: rare photos of a young and happy Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse, the scandalous and talented British singer who joined Club 27 in 2011, would have turned 36 today, having burned brightly and rapidly in the fire of fame and drug madness.

But let's remember her completely different — young, cheerful, flirtatious, bursting with health. This is exactly how she remained forever in the pictures of Charles Moriarty, who photographed the 20-year-old Amy for the promo campaign of her first album.

The cover of Amy Winehouse's debut album Frank.

During the filming, Amy and Charles wandered through the streets and alleys of the city with a bottle of white wine, filming the future star right in the process of working drunkenness. In the photo that will immortalize her first album, Winehouse smiles while standing in a pink translucent T-shirt. In her hands is a leash on which she leads a small black puppy.

He and Moriarty sometimes borrowed dogs on the move from random passers-by. The black arrows — the singer's business card — were completely different then.

There is no Amy in these pictures, who will later become the main character of the paparazzi photos. Here, on the threshold of fame, Winehouse is not afraid of the camera — she meets the truthful eye of the lens with a flirtatious, full of life look.

When Amy Winehouse died in 2011, Moriarty didn't know what to do with the unpublished pictures of the singer. He didn't want to sell these photos or use them for vulgar episodes in the yellow press. He just kept them with him and had no desire to show them to anyone.

Everything changed when Asif Kapadia's documentary "Amy" about the singer's life was released. The film showed what the mass media has never seen: her cheeky sense of humor, boundless compassion, fanatical love of music, her courage and rare self-doubt.

At that moment, Charles Moriarty realized that Winehouse's early photographs should make a book that would best show the real Amy.

Moriarty decided to raise funds on Kickstarter to publish these pictures in the form of a photobook.

The album collected several dozen previously unpublished pictures of the singer, most of which were taken in 2003.

During her lifetime, pictures of Winehouse in the press seemed commonplace. No one could have even imagined that in the future we would look with interest and a lump in our throat at the portraits of Amy taken at a time when she was still happy, healthy and carefree.