Photographer and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson recognizes herself in her early self-portraits, but says she feels a considerable distance from the young woman depicted in them.
“I feel like I’m sort of six people away from who that one was,” she says, pointing to an early self-portrait hanging at Atlanta’s Jackson Fine Art gallery, where her new exhibition She Was I is bringing together work from across her career.
The woman before me seems a world away from the young woman in the enormous black-and-white photograph beside us: a punkish art student in aviator sunglasses, sneering defiantly out at the world as she strikes a classical contrapposto pose, knickers down, T-shirt delivering the message: “FUCK SUCK SPANK WANK.”
And yet, the longer I look, the more the distance gives way to recognition.
