The artist, filmmaker, and photographer&nbsp;reflects on how her relationship with self-portraiture has evolved over time.

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s life is defined by portraiture. When she first became a celebrated artist, alongside peers like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, her most notable works were ribald self-portraits with titles like Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank and disarming portraits of celebrities, including a sleeping David Beckham and a nearly naked Robert Downey Jr., draped across a bed and crying real tears for her camera. When she became a director, she began with the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, starring her future husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson; the pair married shortly after and share two daughters. They squeezed in another biopic together, 2018’s A Million Little Pieces, among Taylor-Johnson’s other films, including the Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation that, at the time, marked the biggest opening weekend for a female-directed film.
Now, her decades-long career is captured in Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait, a compelling monograph of her rich, indelible portraiture. The book—which coincides with She Was I, a career-spanning solo exhibition at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, on view through January—features never-before-seen images, including self-portraits of her cancer-surgery scars (she beat the disease twice, once in her late 20s and again in her early 30s). Her iconic photo series, like “Crying Men,” can be found within, alongside rare images of her daughters and, of course, her husband. Extremely personal essays by her dear friends Emin and war photographer Lynsey Addario, as well as Taylor-Johnson herself, lend context to the artist’s most intimate works.
“It’s here. Look!” Taylor-Johnson chirps over Zoom, whipping out the book. It’s a large tome, with a portrait of Taylor-Johnson submerged in deep, dark water on the cover. She’s nestled now in a beautiful, wood-paneled apartment in Manhattan, wearing gold aviator glasses and a cherry-red sweater. She’s happy and relaxed, thrilled that the nearly two-year process of making the book—a 224-page monograph published by Rizzoli, available now—is over. In a wide-ranging Q&amp;A, Taylor-Johnson reflects on the creative process, her vulnerable portraits of her husband, and the photos she was almost too afraid to share.

L’OFFICIEL: When did you realize portraiture was the connective tissue of this work?
Sam Taylor-Johnson: It was a long process to get there, but [editor] Honey Luard, who I used to work with when I was with White Cube Gallery, really championed it and said, I feel like you should focus on your portraits, along with your self-portraits. Once we had that as a framework, it revealed itself. Not overnight. It was definitely months upon months, but it would turn over and start to shape itself, if that makes sense. Then I would print out copies of everything, and I’d have my studio floor filled with pages and pages. And then it was almost like going into a jazz free-form. There’s a rhythm if you can see it. Once I started to see that rhythm, even if it was only me that could see it, it became quite a flow. And once you’re in the flow, it becomes such a joyous experience. But getting to that place is arduous.
L'O: Could you tell me about the cover image?
STJ: The cover is from a relatively new, unseen body of work called “Self-Portrait in Dark Water.” I’d finished Back to Black. In making a film, you sometimes really lose yourself to it, and I did really lose myself to that film. It took time to put myself back together, so those pictures were about how I was feeling, how I was drowning, but at the same time feeling like it’s a transitional moment into something else.

L’O: I was listening to an interview you did where you talked about the “Crying Men” series. You realized you were doing that to process your grief from having cancer, by having people sit in front of you and cry. I’d love to hear more about that revelation.
STJ: It started out as an editorial job. GQ asked me, Would you do Hollywood portraits of the guys that are being nominated this year? And I remember thinking, Sounds fun, but it needs to be something more. Because normally it’s posturing; it’s presenting this guy with a flash of a smile and an ego. “I’m top of my game.” And I thought, How about we see the flip side of that? How about we see these men as vulnerable, as human, and not just as iconic? But I didn’t tell GQ that. I just said, Can I do whatever I want? They gave me carte blanche, and so off I went.
I didn’t tell the people who were coming in to sit that they were going to have to cry. I figured that most of them would say, No, thank you, so everyone arrived with no idea that I was going to ask them to cry, and then it was a really fast negotiation before they left and walked out the door. The hardest one was Benicio Del Toro, because he was my first one. He was like, Cry? Me? No way.
L’O: He was like, I’m here to look cool.
STJ: But then] he said, Let’s give it a go. Once I had him, I could ask the next person and so on. I did the portfolio for GQ as it started, but then I just kept thinking, I haven’t finished. It needs to be a bigger thing. It took the best part of three years and was 28 men in the end. And that got to a point where I was like, I cannot walk into a room with somebody I really admire and ask them to break down and cry anymore. It’s exhausting. Forest Whitaker was the last person I photographed, and he really gave the most raw—I wouldn’t say performance, because it wasn’t a performance. He sat down and said, Tears? I’ll give you tears, and the photographs were amazing. But I got on the flight home and thought, What is this I’m doing? And then the thought process started to kick in of the grief of each of these people and me transposing, if that’s the right word, my grief in a way. My own grief was unable to come through and I was having other people do it for me.

L’O: What was the story behind the Robin Williams photo?
STJ: It gives me chills every time I think about it. It really does. I met with him, and probably in the first 10 minutes, he threw about five different personalities at me. He would do all these different accents. When I started to talk about the project with him, he zoned in and stopped performing in that way. And he wanted to know specifics. He was one of the few that said, Where’s this coming from? And it made me reflect. Where is this coming from? I did say that I’d been very ill and this is my first project since being in that place. Once he connected with me in that way, he sat very quietly and went to that space. Now on reflection looking at that portrait, it has such a profound devastation around it because it’s a vulnerable moment of somebody that we now reflect on and realize was vulnerable without any of us understanding that necessarily at the time. There’s one of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the same. Now I look at those portraits with a different connection, I guess.
L’O: What was it like to photograph Philip Seymour Hoffman? Lynsey also mentions it in her essay.
STJ: That was at the Chelsea Hotel here in New York. When I described what I was doing, he just went very quiet, sat at the end of the bed. And I just quietly started taking pictures. And you can see and sense where somebody’s going. I just had to sit and honor that. The thing I find so powerful about his, in particular, is the simple vulnerability of his feet and the way they’re touching. I know it’s strange, because obviously the face is saying so much, but there’s something about his body language.
L’O: Speaking of body language, the Robert Downey Jr. portrait is really spectacular, and I’m assuming it’s pre-Iron Man. I can’t imagine him necessarily posing like that now.
STJ: Yeah, that was pre-Marvel. I had made a music video with him called “I Want Love,” which was an Elton John song. It’s one take of him lip-syncing. He was in the first chapter of his new life of sobriety, so that music video felt very strong for both Elton and for him. After that video, we became friends and remained in touch. I told him about this project, and he was just like, Yes, come over whenever you’re next in LA and I’d be happy to do it. And that was shot in his apartment.
L’O: I love that you mentioned Elton. Is it true he said you’re the woman he would want to spend his life with if he were straight?
STJ: [Laughs] He did say that! Yeah. He often says it still; it’s really cute.

L’O: I mentioned Lynsey earlier. She and Tracey Emin write essays in this book. How did you decide they should be voices in it?
STJ: With this book, I didn’t want big art texts and I didn’t want an art historian or a curator or that kind of thing. I wanted two artists that knew me because the book is quite personal in so many ways. Tracey, I’ve known since the beginning, since the ’90s, and we grew up through the art world together. And with Lynsey, I’ve known her for the best part of the last 10 years, and she’s obviously got a completely different use of her camera. She’s the most incredible documenter of our current world conflicts, and she runs towards what most of us would run away from. But I know her as a friend, as this bubbly, effervescent, fun person who wants to get her nails and hair done with me.
L'O: I love what both of them wrote, but Tracey’s obviously is so personal and detailed.
STJ: I mean, Tracey is that person. I didn’t know what to expect, but she wrote from the heart and I couldn’t have hoped for anything more. I didn’t mind how personal she went with it because her work is very much like that. There are no boundaries to it.
L’O: She even mentions you both lost your virginity in the same town.
STJ: I know. [Laughs] I’m reading that and I’m like, Whoa, there we go. That’s in the world.
L’O: It’s Tracey, so it makes sense in the context of her work. I loved that.
STJ: No, totally. And it felt like a gift. I really felt like both of them gave me a gift that I can treasure in print.
L’O: They also both talk about your battles with colon cancer and breast cancer in their essays. You included self-portraits of your scars from surgeries. Can you talk about the inclusion of those photos?
STJ: Yeah. I’ve never included that side. I’ve always sort of smoke-and-mirrored it in a way with a lot of the self-portraits. So much of it is about emotional scars. Actually showing the physical scars felt like... I put [the photos] in, took them out, put them in, took them out quite a lot. It felt very honest and nerve-wrackingly vulnerable in many ways, too. But my other work is so physical. Why not show the battle wounds? But it was quite difficult to include them.
L’O: Because of what it evokes for you? Or the literal imagery?
STJ: Yeah. The somatic trauma that comes up with visual imagery. It doesn’t go away. Your body holds on to that. It resonates when I see those images. And I haven’t necessarily addressed them. But this felt like, Okay, bam, let’s just slam it on the table.
L’O: Is this the first time these photos are being publicized?
STJ: Yeah, it’s the first time.

L’O: While we’re talking about personal images, there are photos of your daughters and your husband. How did you go about selecting those images?
STJ: It’s hard with the kids because I never have put them out there. But it felt like they were historical pictures rather than present-day pictures, which felt better in a way. I have millions of pictures of all of them, but if I were to re-edit it tomorrow, I’d probably change them all.
L’O: Did they have input on the photos that you chose?
STJ: No. And of course they’re all girls so they’re like, Could you not have picked one where my hair looked [different] or...? And I was like, No! Similarly with Aaron, I literally have tens of thousands of photos of him. I love the photograph of him asleep on the couch. I’ve always got my camera, so he doesn’t even see it anymore, which is great. Especially with all the films and the characters, I’ve got a document of so many aspects of all the different worlds that he transitions in and out of. So that could be its own book.

Sam Taylor-Johnson Turns the Lens on Herself

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