Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait

From her earliest photographs to her record-breaking feature film Fifty Shades of Grey, Taylor-Johnson has consistently investigated the boundaries between still and moving images, using both to create bold, psychologically rich portraits and self-portraits.Drawing from extensive archives across her full range of media, the book captures the evolution of her vision from the acrobatic vitality of her iconic early floating self-portraits to the quiet intensity of her celebrated Crying Men series, as well as intimate images made on set and behind the scenes of her film work.Together, these pictures reveal a career-long inquiry into what constitutes a portrait and how identity can be expressed, staged, disrupted, or reimagined.Curated and accompanied by new writing by Taylor-Johnson herself, the book marks the artist s renewed focus on photography.Published in tandem with a new series of self-portraits, it offers an expansive, deeply personal look at an artist whose innovative engagement with image-making continues to shape contemporary visual culture.