Star in the making! Taylor Swift goes from white-blonde toddler to teen with a dream in unseen family pH๏τo album

She’s a multi-platinum, award-winning artist as famous for her remarkable talent as for her tortured A-list romances.

But pH๏τographer Andrew Orth will always remember Taylor Swift as the bubbly little girl next door.

Andrew – an old family friend and former neighbour to the Swift family – has opened up his albums to reveal what has become a breathtaking pH๏τo diary of Taylor’s early years, from the ages of four to 16.

His pH๏τographs – taken over the course of a decade – capture the evolution of Taylor Swift from an adorable white blonde-haired toddler to a striking teenager destined for stardom.

Andrew remembers when her mother and father Andrea and Scott Swift brought newborn Taylor in a bundle to his parents’ home across the fence from their farm in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Andrew’s mother used to babysit for Taylor, and when he came home for the holidays from Los Angeles where he was a portrait celebrity pH๏τographer, Andrea would ask him to take family pH๏τographs.

His first sH๏τs of Taylor were taken in their family barn when she was just four years old.

Andrew remembered: ‘Taylor was a very pretty little girl, as you can see from her young pictures. She had this white hair, crystal blue eyes, pale skin, and pouty lips. She was just something.’

He said of the earliest pH๏τos, which show Taylor smiling in her barn with her two front teeth missing: ‘She had a way about her, she knew she was adorable and she really was the cutest thing in the world.’

He remembers young Taylor as ‘a huggy little girl’ with an ‘extraordinary talent’.

Andrew, who often pH๏τographed children with talent agencies in Los Angeles, recalled: ‘I would tell her parents, “You don’t understand, she’s amazing. She is the most amazing little girl you’re ever going to meet.” ‘

He continued to pH๏τograph Taylor until she was 16, after she and her family left Pennsylvania for Nashville, where she would go on to make her name in country music.

As her career began to grow, he sH๏τ pH๏τographs for Taylor’s first EP as well as the cover for her self-тιтled début album.

He said: ‘I would go down to Nashville and stay with the family. We’d all hang out, have dinners, I’d sleep over for about a week, and we’d shoot for three days at all these locations I’d written down.’

Many of Andrew’s pH๏τos are from a Nashville shoot they did when Taylor was 14. He said: ‘She’s so pH๏τogenic, I couldn’t take a bad sH๏τ of this girl!’

One fateful pH๏τo from the shoot shows Taylor holding her guitar up in front of an empty stadium in Nashville. He remembers telling the teen: ‘Pretend you’re famous. Hop up there and hold your guitar like there’s millions of people cheering and clapping for you.’

It’s a pose Taylor has recreated before stadiums full of screaming fans across the world. But back then, he remembers: ‘It was just me and her there.’

He even got to see Taylor play guitar in her childhood home, explaining: ‘When Taylor was around 12 or 13 years old, I’d say, “Taylor, can you sing me some songs you’ve been writing?” and without hesitation she’d grab her guitar, look at her fingers on the frets and start singing.

‘It was so adorable I got goose bumps, and I’d think to myself, “Oh man, she’s amazing just amazing. Wait til the world gets a hold of her!”’

In addition to shooting Taylor, Andrew developed a unique relationship with his subject, who he watched grow up from a spectacular little girl to a successful young woman.

He said: ‘She was like my little kid sister.’ He remembers her as a ‘quiet soul’ and a ‘loner, but in a good way,’ revealing: ‘She is completely happy being by herself. She’s not a depressive or a dark person who goes and hides in a corner.

Taylor was the closet thing to a normal kid as it got with the exception that she’d go off in her own world and create these fantastic stories and had the talent to write about it.’

Andrew even recalled the young singer’s early forays into the dating troubles that are now synonymous with her brand.

Around her fifteenth birthday, he remembered a boy visiting her home. When he asked her mother about the boy a few weeks later, she said: ‘Oh, he’s gone.’

Dating, Andrew believes, will be easier for Taylor when she’s older. He said: ‘It’s something she’ll grow into. Probably in her thirties she’ll find something more that’s significant…I think that she has no patience for them now.’

He added: ‘She’s the kind of girl that when she finds the right guy, she’s going to stick with him’

A lot has changed since Andrew worked with Taylor as a toddler and early teen. Her country roots have turned towards pop, and her trademark curls have been straightened.

But Andrew thinks it’s all part of Taylor’s ever-changing personality.

He said: ‘Taylor is an inventor to start with and a re-inventor who knows how to continue to send the same message in a different way.

‘It’s not a bad thing, she’s just a creative re-inventor and I think that’s what she’s doing with her career now, bangs and all.’