Bordered by Buckhead skyscrapers with pumpkins on its porch steps, Jackson Fine Art welcomed collectors to the opening of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s She Was I on Thursday afternoon.
The British filmmaker known for 50 Shades of Grey kicked off her solo photography show at the residential gallery in Atlanta with her longtime friend and fellow artist, R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe.
The October sun illuminated Taylor-Johnson’s colorful portraits of Ralph Fiennes, Sienna Miller and Courtney Love in the foyer of the custom-built contemporary art bungalow, which relocated to its current space in 2023. Patrons in an adjoining room nibbled from a petal-strewn cheeseboard beneath riveting images of actors Daniel Craig, Laurence Fishburne, Hayden Christensen and Philip Seymour Hoffman, each pictured with tears in his eyes — a series of photographs known as “Crying Men.” Many of the framed works were very reasonably priced, and a lovely coffee-table book, Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait (released this month by Rizzoli Electa) should appeal to fans of bespoke celebrity photography.
Over the past decade, the internationally respected gallery has presented the work of civil rights documenter Gordon Parks, Sally Mann, William Eggleston and Stipe’s 2024 show and Damiani book, Even the birds gave pause, among many others.
JFA director Anna Walker-Skillman introduced Taylor-Johnson and Stipe before initiating a discussion between the multidisciplinary artists. Taylor-Johnson is famous for directing films including Back to Black, Nowhere Boy and A Million Little Pieces, and the Stipe is an iconoclastic musician from Georgia who fronted one of the world’s biggest (and most melodic) bands.
Walker-Skillman said she’d carefully assembled Taylor-Johnson’s current exhibition after first showing her art here in Atlanta in 2007; she said her ties to Stipe stretched back to the University of Georgia and Athens in the 1980s.
During the artists’ talk, Taylor-Johnson and Stipe shared memories of their first meeting at the 2005 charity concert Live 8 in London, where he wore a stripe of peacock-blue face paint that caught her eye and inspired the 2024 portrait of him in this show. They gave a shoutout to the Talking Heads song, “And She Was,” for its connection to a 1987 triptych of a young Taylor-Johnson in ripped jeans and leather jacket.
A trained visual artist and Goldsmiths grad, Sam Taylor-Johnson recalled an early career display in which her work hung in London in a “Freud-Bacon sandwich” between that of art stars Lucian and Francis.
Stipe commended her for the bravery of overcoming colon and breast cancer in her late 20s and early 30s and praised a 1997 image of Taylor-Johnson dressed in a T-shirt with an explicit and humorous slogan she transformed into a feminist statement.
Taylor-Johnson described how she shot immense landscapes while dangling from a crane above a DeLorean and other vehicles in the California desert in 2020. The three images in the Wired series at JFA are large-format photos that expand the scope, space and depth of self-portraiture.
As for the actors in her Crying Men series, Taylor-Johnson said the photos’ power lies in the mystery of how she got her subjects to show emotion. Which of the men were acting or emoting naturally? She wouldn’t say.
Stipe remembered visiting Taylor-Johnson and encouraging her to scurry across a Hollywood lane to photograph her late neighbor, artist David Hockney. Her resulting 2019 portraits of the 1960s “A Bigger Splash” painter, who died in June, are some of the highlights in the JFA exhibition: a black-and-white close-up and studied snap of Hockney standing in his studio, dressed in an emerald-green sweater and rumpled trousers in front of an unfinished canvas.
The pair then listed mutual connections to former Atlanta resident, photography collector and musical hero Elton John and reminisced about their own collaborations, including her 2011 music video for R.E.M.’s “Überlin,” featuring her husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson skipping through London streets, and Michael Stipe’s 2019 single “Your Capricious Soul.”
Taylor-Johnson said she couldn’t wait for the rest of the world to hear Stipe’s long-awaited solo album, scheduled for May 2027, with the first single slated for New Year’s Eve.
“Honestly, we’re all in for so much joy,” she told the JFA crowd.
After the discussion, Taylor-Johnson and Stipe sat down with GPB to reflect on their friendship and creative processes.
TRANSCRIPT
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kristi York Wooten: When was the first time you came to Atlanta, Sam? And were your perceptions about the city shaped by knowing Elton John?
Credit: Elton John
Sam Taylor-Johnson: I think it was the initial reason why I came here, actually, because he’d asked me to photograph the cover of his 2004 album, Peachtree Road. So that was the genesis of my first trip, coming here for that. I didn’t know what I was going to photograph… I just wanted to pick up my camera, be free with it and sort of tread the path of many great photographers who’ve been from this part of the world…So, that’s how I started off my relationship with Georgia. I was driving around taking pictures, and I didn’t know what was going to come of it, for the album, for him— and that picture he chose [of a lonesome railroad crossing at Pinehurst in Dooly County, Ga., about 125 miles south of Atlanta] was perfect.
Kristi York Wooten: I want to ask about the 2009 John Lennon biopic you directed, Nowhere Boy. There’s a line [the John Lennon character says in the film] that talks about geniuses and artists having nowhere to go.
Sam Taylor-Johnson: “Nowhere is where I belong.”
Kristi York Wooten: Do you both think, as artists, that is true? I mean, even looking at the photographs, which are different from your work in film, but the empty space, the large swaths of space, especially in the American photos [in the desert], that you pointed out. That’s “nowhere.”
Sam Taylor-Johnson: It’s an interesting question, and it’s always nice to be asked questions that people have never asked before. It means you have to really think on your feet! It’s a very pertinent point, because I think that taking those photographs in Joshua Tree, as well as some of the ones in London, it’s sort of really establishing yourself within so many possibilities. You know, it could be anywhere. So I suppose it is that. I mean it’s a great quote to align myself with, especially with Lennon.
Michael Stipe: There’s a maniacal aspect to the ego that is required to consider one’s innermost thoughts, projected outwards through whatever medium one chooses — whether it’s photography, painting, dance, performance, songwriting — that there’s a value to that. And in order to do so, you have to not only embrace that ego but also embrace the humility that it takes when you face-plant in a very public way. And so Nowhere, I think, is a very important part of that, because you are literally staring into emptiness [when you create]. You have no idea where this is gonna go or if there’s gonna be an audience for you. And it takes that combination of ego and humility to do what we do.
Sam Taylor-Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a certain part of you that has to be really firm with yourself that the idea is important enough to put into the world and then be vulnerable about it later.
Kristi York Wooten: I want to ask about the role of portraiture, and the word “portrait,” and how I’ve read AI can’t handle the word “portrait,” because it thinks of a portrait as just a picture, and it’s something AI cannot grasp. So, each of you — whether it’s a song as a portrait (because songs are portraits), photographs or films — what is the element that is going to keep portraiture human?
Sam Taylor-Johnson: One thing I don’t think AI will be able to recognize is a portrait of somebody’s soul. I think they’ll be able to mimic photographs of people, but that connection between a photographer and somebody… When you take a picture, you steal a moment, which is looking really deep within the recesses of somebody and who they are. And when you can, you know, take that in a sort of a 125th of a second, that moment, and see that you’ve seen a whole history in an eye, I don’t think AI will ever capture that.
Kristi York Wooten: That’s why I love going to photography openings — it’s the two-dimensionality, it’s my favorite thing right now. I love 2D more than anything. What about your idea of a portrait, Michael?
Michael Stipe: The show I had here, the last book I put out [2024’s Even the birds gave pause], and the show in Milan at the ICA [in 2023] questioned, “What is a portrait?” And we’re not the first people to do that, clearly: Jack Pierson has done it brilliantly, Wolfgang Tillmans has done it brilliantly, Sally Mann has done it brilliantly. But I’m going to push the AI to the side. I don’t care about that conversation. It doesn’t interest me.
Expanding, or trying to grasp the idea of what a portrait can be beyond a head-and-shoulders image of a person, or a three-dimensional or two-dimensional image of that, I think, is very important and very human. And I agree with Sam. There’s an aspect of soul, whatever that means, that is inherent in the desire, but also the communication between two people, when you’re trying to do something like capture an emotion or a feeling or a sadness or a triumph or just someone who has the ability to catch light in a certain way.
And it can become harder and harder to be an artist using photography in a world where everyone has an entire photo studio in their phone. But I think it also becomes easier, because there’s so much dreck. And I’ll go back to [Sam Taylor-Johnson’s collection of portraits] “Crying Men”]. It takes an extraordinary eye to be able to not only come up with the idea, but then see it through, and see it through for what we now know as three years’ time and present a body of work that really shifts the conversation about what is real, what is not real, what is a portrait, what is not.
Kristi York Wooten: Very good, because reality doesn’t have to be whether something’s AI or not.
Sam Taylor-Johnson: Yes.
Kristi York Wooten: So a final question about your friendship, your artistic partnership, which we heard started when you met at the Live 8 concert in London in 2005. I know you both have lots of collaborators that you work with. But what’s the one unique thing [about your relationship as artists]? And what’s special about being here celebrating it with your show [in Atlanta]?
Sam Taylor-Johnson: There’s multi layers to that. Magical is a word I’ll use in terms of our relationship, with Michael and I, because, you know, we collaborate very easily. It’s sort of like dolphin clicks. You know, that sort of conversation where Michael can say to me, “I have this song…” and I’ll know within a bar or two already the atmosphere of something that needs to be created around it. And to be able to have that unison with somebody who is an artist, and we can kind of form something together out of Michael presenting a song and me just attaching a thought process to it, and then it becomes something where, you know, it has its own unique life, is quite something. And then friendship? We just have fun.
Michael Stipe: And lots of it.
Sam Taylor-Johnson: And lots of it! And just, you know, enjoy. Whenever I come into town, Michael and Thomas, Michael’s husband, are the first people I always call, because I just know, right, “Where are we going into the night?”
Michael Stipe: And it happens, and it continues happening in the most beautiful way.
Sam Taylor-Johnson: And it’s just, you know, there are certain people and friendships which endure, because there’s a synergy which is unexplainable sometimes. And I think that is, you know … magical is my best way of saying it.
Michael Stipe: I do love the magical aspect, and that just blew out of me [during the gallery talk] … You are a very magical creature. And, you’re also very instinctual. And I think that’s important to being an artist — not only acknowledging one’s instinct but also trusting it. And there’s an ease with which we are able to be together and laugh hysterically about everything.
Sam Taylor-Johnson: Same goes. But you know, going back to when I first met Michael, because it’s something I haven’t said yet, is that when we met and then I went to watch his performance on stage, and I remember standing there thinking, “This man’s a shaman. He’s conjuring.” It’s like I could see, almost like this beam of light between him and another universe.
It was really one of the most incredible moments … and I’m not just saying that because he’s here. Because I just remember it so clearly, thinking, “That was a shamanic performance.” And I think that’s partly what we do. We’re conjuring and pulling from other worlds.
Michael Stipe: And we’re interpreting it through whoever we are, whatever we have to offer, whatever our experiences. And those are quite profound experiences.
Sam Taylor-Johnson: Quite profound experiences. And one of my favorite portraits in the show is the one of Michael [captured in Saint Paul de Vence in the 2026 photography monograph The Self and the Portrait], because it just was a moment where I saw the blue light across his face and that correlation between the first time we met, which I didn’t put together at the time. That was later.
Michael Stipe: I’m very honored to be a part of the book.
Kristi York Wooten: Thank you both for sharing your stories.
See Sam Taylor-Johnson’s show “She was I” through Jan. 23, 2027, at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta.
