“If God gave you the talent, you should go for it. But don’t think it’s going to be easy,” Aaliyah Dana Houghton knew, and so she spoke. She sang and danced too, more than a woman, you know. She was, she is, an eternal flame burning in memory of a woman gone too soon. She died as she lived, a shooting star cast across the sky. On January 16, 2014, Aaliyah would be 35, were she not to have died on August 25, 2001, at her prime.
In July of her final year, Eric Johnson photographed Aaliyah for Entertainment Weekly, and since that time, photographs from the shoot that have gone around the globe. Whether gracing the cover of Vibe magazine’s memorial issue or illustrating Aaliyah’s Wikipedia page, the photographs have become so emblematic of that singer’s mystique that they have been remade countless times as murals, paintings, and drawings that are seen everywhere from Instagram to Times Square.