Sam Taylor-Johnson Turns Her Lens on Herself in Atlanta

Sam Taylor-Johnson's solo exhibition She Was I opens at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta and runs through January 23, 2027 — a run long enough that no one can claim they missed it by accident.

The show arrives alongside a milestone in print: the photographer's new monograph Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait, published by Rizzoli. A solo exhibition and a Rizzoli book in the same season is the institutional equivalent of a formal endorsement.

What's on the walls?

The exhibition traces Taylor-Johnson's career-long fixation on identity and the self, in both photography and film. It centers on her self-portraits, starting with early black-and-white photographs she made in London in the 1990s while still a student. That early work anchors everything: a young artist already pointing the camera at herself before anyone particularly wanted her to.

More than a decade later, she returned to self-portraiture with images of herself suspended in her London studio, appearing weightless, seemingly held aloft by balloons. The trick, of course, is that she isn't. The craft is in making the artifice legible.

Then there is Wired, photographed in Joshua Tree, California, in 2020. Here Taylor-Johnson goes further: the fragile support mechanisms holding her body above the ground become an integral part of the composition. The scaffolding stops being a hidden means and becomes the subject. It's a candid admission that the whole suspension — literal and metaphorical — is constructed.

The exhibition also presents Self Portrait in Dark Water, a more recent series in which Taylor-Johnson uses water to suspend her body in unusual positions. Jackson Fine Art is showing it to U.S. audiences for the first time. That fact matters; American viewers have simply not seen this body of work in person before.

The Crying Men return

A selection from Crying Men will also hang in the show. Taylor-Johnson created the series between 2002 and 2004, photographing more than two dozen leading male actors whom she invited to sit before her camera in moments of private reflection. The portraits capture the subjects crying — unguarded, exposed, and stripped of the composure their public personas usually require.

The sitter list is not minor: Daniel Craig, Laurence Fishburne and Philip Seymour Hoffman all wept for her lens. Made two decades ago, the series remains her most cited work, and with reason. It flipped the standard dynamic of celebrity portraiture: instead of projecting authority, the subjects surrendered it.

Family photographs, but not quite

Alongside the portraits of actors, the exhibition includes photographs of Taylor-Johnson's family and friends in private, familiar settings. These works carry a semi-autobiographical quality, and they complicate the show rather than pad it. They offer another angle on the relationships between identity, personal experience and portraiture — the self, it turns out, is partly other people.

Taken together, the works in She Was I examine how the complexities of individual identity can be both revealed and concealed. That is the exhibition's real thesis. Taylor-Johnson has spent three decades showing that a self-portrait is as much a performance as a confession, and that the seams — the wires, the water, the tears — are where the truth actually sits.

Why this show, why now

For a photographer who began in black-and-white London in the 1990s, a Rizzoli monograph plus a long-running American solo show is a consolidation of standing, not a debut. With Self Portrait in Dark Water reaching U.S. viewers for the first time, She Was I looks like the beginning of a broader American reassessment of Taylor-Johnson's portraiture — one that runs in Atlanta through January 23, 2027.