| Love her or hate her, Paige Spiranac has become an influential figure in the world of golf. When Golf Digest decided to take on the ubiquitous and well-managed starlet as a subject, we knew we had to swing big to break the veneer and discover the human being behind the Instagram account.
To accelerate trust, we put two remarkable women in charge. Allison Glock has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, ESPN The Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone and her work has been anthologized in Best American Sports Writing several times. Her piece, “Under the Influence: How Paige Spiranac took a life she never wanted and turned it into golf’s largest social media empire” is a provocative, yet sympathetic examination of a serious competitive golfer who became something else.
Equally revealing are the portraits by Caroline Tompkins, a professor at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and a prolific photographer whose past clients include Vogue, Chanel, Art Basel, Smithsonian, and The Wall Street Journal, to name a few. Included here is an extended gallery of her photographs of Spiranac that did not run in our June Issue, as well as our conversation with Tompkins. |
