Sam Taylor-Johnson

Ben Stiller, 2004

Sam Taylor Johnson Biography Sam Taylor-Johnson OBE (formerly Sam Taylor-Wood) is a British photographer and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice spans photography, video, and feature film. For nearly four decades, Taylor-Johnson has probed the fault lines between inner life and public persona, drawing the privately felt into the public realm. Working often with prominent cultural figures, Taylor-Johnson teases out the moments when the self-slips, spontaneously, into view - never more memorably than in the 2003/04 series Crying Men, in which she photographed male actors in tears, including Sean Penn, Paul Newman, and Robin Williams, and in her hour-long 2004 video portrait commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, London of David Beckham sleeping. From the early self-portrait Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit with Hare (2001) to the gravity-defying Self Portrait Suspended (2003/04) series, Sam Taylor-Johnson's photographs stage a recurring confrontation between external perception and self-identification. Born in 1967 in London, Taylor-Johnson studied sculpture at Goldsmiths College, emerging alongside the generation of Young British Artists who came to prominence in the 1990s. She turned from sculpture to photography and video early on, merging a cinematic sensibility with the still image. Encouraged toward filmmaking by Anthony Minghella, who produced her Palme d'Or-nominated short Love You More (2008), Taylor-Johnson went on to direct Nowhere Boy (2009), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), A Million Little Pieces (2018), and Back to Black (2024), earning numerous BAFTA nominations. Taylor-Johnson's studio practice has been documented in monographs published by Steidl, including a 2002 volume produced for her Hayward Gallery retrospective and Still Lives (Steidl/BALTIC, 2006). Her next monograph, The Self and the Portrait, will be released in the September 2026. Her editorial and commissioned work ranges from the 2014 series Second Floor, photographing Coco Chanel's private Paris apartment, to an artist-book edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. She won the Illy Café Prize at the 1997 Venice Biennale, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998, and was appointed OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2011 for her contributions to British arts and culture. Taylor-Johnson's work is held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. She has held solo museum exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich (1997), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (1997), Fondazione Prada, Milan (1998), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2000), Hayward Gallery, London (2002), and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2006). Sam Taylor-Johnson's first solo exhibition with Jackson Fine Art will premiere in October 2026.