Sam Taylor-Johnson OBE (formerly Sam Taylor-Wood) is a British visual artist and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses photography, video and feature film. For nearly 40 years, her collaborative work has engaged in an enquiry into psychological interiority and the sociocultural narratives through which both selfhood and collective consciousness are shaped.
Born in 1967 in London, UK, Taylor-Johnson studied sculpture at Goldsmiths College, London, alongside a generation of British artists who came to prominence in the 1990s. From the outset, her work has probed the fault lines of lived experience; in early photographic works, most notably the iconic self-portraits ‘Slut’ (1993), and ‘Fuck Suck Spank Wank’’ (1997), she stages a confrontation between external perception and self-identification. Similarly, in formative video works such as ‘Travesty of a Mockery’ (1995) and ‘Atlantic’ (1997), the artist constructs emotionally charged tableaux in which couples, locked in fraught exchanges, attempt to navigate the complexities of intimacy and connection.
Across her work in both art and film, Taylor-Johnson draws the privately felt into the public realm, exposing the dissonance between inner life and public persona. Often working with prominent cultural figures, as in her 2003/04 series ‘Crying Men’ in which she photographed male actors in tears, or her hour-long 2004 video portrait of David Beckham sleeping, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, London, Taylor-Johnson teases out the inner lives of her subjects, distilling those moments in which the private self slips, unbidden, into view.
Following her participation in the Venice Biennale in 1997 and a Turner Prize nomination at Tate the following year, Taylor-Johnson’s rising international acclaim led to solo exhibitions at several major European museums, including Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (1997); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (1997); Prada Foundation, Milan, Italy (1998); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2000); Hayward Gallery, London (2002); and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2006).
In the early 2000s, Anthony Minghella encouraged Taylor-Johnson to pursue filmmaking, producing her directorial debut, and Palme d’Or nominated, ‘Love You More’ (2008) – a tender coming-of-age short set to the soundtrack of punk-era London. Her first feature film, ‘Nowhere Boy’ (2009), based on the early life of John Lennon, marked her transition into long-form cinema. She has since directed ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ (2015), the highest-grossing film by a female director, A Million Little Pieces (2018) and, most recently, ‘Back to Black’ (2024), while also working prolifically across short films, Netflix series and music videos.
Whilst film projects have been central to Taylor-Johnson’s work over the past two decades, garnering numerous BAFTA nominations and awards, her studio practice has remained a constant. In 2022, she exhibited a new series of self-portraits at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome. These large-scale photographs depict the artist suspended high above the arid landscape of Joshua Tree National Park in California, serving as companion pieces to her earlier series ‘Self-portrait Suspended’ (2003/04). In turning the camera lens back on herself, Taylor-Johnson brings to the fore a precarious and demanding balance between the duality of the physical self and the ethereal mind.
Through her embrace of diverse creative modalities, Taylor-Johnson has continued to address the psychic friction of selfhood, drawing out the tragedies and joys that arise when the inner self collides with the outside world.
