When photographer and director Sam Taylor-Johnson met R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe at a Live 8 concert in 2005, a thick stripe of blue paint ran across the upper third of his face. Nearly two decades later, she found herself photographing Stipe at a church in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, his face awash in blue once again, this time from sunlight filtering in through the church's stained glass windows. The portrait is one of more than 200 compiled in The Self and The Portrait, Taylor-Johnson's debut photo book out now with Rizzoli. Spanning her career, the compendium moves from Crying Men-her poignant examination of male vulnerability featuring prominent actors weeping in front of her lens-to intimate portraits of celebrated figures like David Hockney, Miuccia Prada, and Courtney Love. Throughout, Taylor-Johnson straddles the line between interiority and celebrity, presenting a thesis on how identity and persona exist in a constant dialectic.
To celebrate the book's release and its accompanying show, She Was I, opening October 22 at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, longtime friends and collaborators Taylor-Johnson and Stipe met up yet again at Electric Lady Studios in New York to discuss the alchemy of film, unexpected banana allergies, and redundancy as artistic freedom.
