For her definitive new book, Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait, Taylor-Johnson has combed through over 30 years of her archive. How was that, I ask her over Zoom. ‘Fucking torture!’ she says. ‘Imagine sitting down and perusing over your life and your kids growing up, and reflecting on that. Where’s that time gone? Doing this book has been a process of that.’
After studying sculpture at Goldsmiths in London, Taylor-Johnson rose to fame alongside her Young British Artist contemporaries in the Nineties. ‘I had a camera, and that was my voice,’ she says. Her deeply personal self-portraits, and those of friends and celebrities including Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tracey Emin, Philip Seymour-Hoffman, Courtney Love, Alexander McQueen and Miuccia Prada – are gathered here, speaking to the core of a practice which cuts through the layers of a persona.
‘The challenge quite often is to go beyond the face of what’s presented,’ says Johnson. ‘In an essay I wrote for the book, I use an example of photographing Paul Newman.’ When stood in front of him, Johnson says, she saw an emotional, soulful and powerful man – but viewed through the lens of the camera, he became Paul Newman, movie star. ‘Even though I could see it in the flesh, I couldn’t get to it until we went through a process of him understanding what I was trying to find. He was such a collaborator and so professional – once he clocked that I was trying to look into his soul and find vulnerability, he gave that. That, for me, is the most magical thing about photography; seeing something or somebody, trying to find it through the lens and freezing it, grabbing it.’
This vulnerability is at the heart of all the work here, emphasised particularly in Crying Men. Taylor-Johnson created the series between 2002 and 2004, asking male actors including Robin Williams, Daniel Craig and Sean Penn to sit in front of her and cry, in a theatrical subversion of our typical expectations. ‘With Forest Whitaker, it took me three years to get to the place where we actually walked into the room,’ Taylor-Johnson adds. ‘He was so amazing because he said, ‘Your patience and resilience in this process are respected. What would you like me to do?’ And I said, ‘You know, I’d like you to cry.’ And he was like, ‘Fuck. OK.’ With that process of being in the room, I’m then very quick. I don’t spend hours.’
Opening simultaneously with the book’s launch is the exhibition, She Was I, at Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, which unites work from in the early 1990s – black-and-white photographs Taylor-Johnson took as a student – through to more recent work which peel back the layers of the psyche.
Through the unguarded honesty of the self-portraiture on display, we trace Taylor-Johnson’s development as both a subject and an artist. We see this particularly in works such as the Self Portrait Suspended series, where Taylor-Johnson floats in mid-air, gloriously freeing herself from the physical constraints her past illnesses, including breast cancer, had imposed. ‘You are also seeing the ageing process, and some of the work here is super personal. I don’t know whether it’s that I’m at a place in life where I’m just thinking, okay, it’s as much a part of me as everything else. I can somehow step back from it and not feel too emotionally traumatised.’
Ultimately, says Taylor-Johnson, the book and the exhibition have been an exercise in curation. ‘I have trawled through digital and print images for this book, and realised I should never have put my film camera down,’ she says. ‘With digital images, it’s a very different mindset of taking pictures. There’s thousands of digital pictures, and probably hundreds on film. With film, you’re so much more aware of how many shots you have on a roll, and digital affords you a million.’ She has told her children, who are studying photography, to learn on film. ‘It forces you to learn how to frame. If you can’t afford to process that roll of film, you’re really going to learn.’
The process of creating the book has been both emotional and frustrating, she adds. ‘Choosing, selecting, refining down – it was tough. And if I was to do it again tomorrow, it’d be a completely different thing.’
Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait (Rizzoli, £55)
She Was I is at Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta until 23 January 2027