Spanning a career devoted to portraiture, multidisciplinary artist SAM TAYLOR-JOHNSON has taken up cameras to make video installations, shorts, and mainstream feature films, all while shooting boundary-pushing still images of herself and an array of cultural figures. Many are collected in a new monograph, Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait (Rizzoli, $75), which marks her renewed focus on photography.
For Taylor-Johnson, part of the 1990s acclaimed Young British Artists - a movement that includes Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst - the tension between observation and performance is often on view, and never more so than in her early aughts Crying Men series.
