Sam Taylor-Johnson and Michael Stipe, courtesy of Sam Taylor-Johnson.
When photographer and director Sam Taylor-Johnson met R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe at a Live 8 concert in 2005, a thick stripe of blue paint ran across the upper third of his face. Nearly two decades later, she found herself photographing Stipe at a church in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, his face awash in blue once again, this time from sunlight filtering in through the church’s stained glass windows. The portrait is one of more than 200 compiled in The Self and The Portrait, Taylor-Johnson’s debut photo book out now with Rizzoli. Spanning her career, the compendium moves from Crying Men— her poignant examination of male vulnerability featuring prominent actors weeping in front of her lens—to intimate portraits of celebrated figures like David Hockney, Miuccia Prada, and Courtney Love. Throughout, Taylor-Johnson straddles the line between interiority and celebrity, presenting a thesis on how identity and persona exist in a constant dialectic.
To celebrate the book’s release and its accompanying show, She Was I, opening October 22 at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, longtime friends and collaborators Taylor-Johnson and Stipe met up yet again at Electric Lady Studios in New York to discuss the alchemy of film, unexpected banana allergies, and redundancy as artistic freedom. –SOFI CISNEROS
SUNDAY 3:30 PM SEPTEMBER 27, 2026, NEW YORK CITY
SAM TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Where should we start? Fuck, I don’t know.
MICHAEL STIPE: We’re promoting the book, right?
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: We’re promoting the book and then also a show in Atlanta, which is great because you’ve shown there already. I’m following in great footsteps.
STIPE: And I’ve done them going back a very long time. It’s a great gallery.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Another great shared history.
STIPE: Yeah. Are you showing new stuff there?
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: In a way, it’s a reflection of the book. Going through film photography was so joyous as opposed to going through digital. Finding these boxes of prints and contact sheets and negatives—I was really organized. But then trying to find images through tens of thousands of digital, tiny little cards and plugging them in was just loathsome. So it sent me back to film because there’s an alchemy and a process that you just can’t replicate. It was such an illuminating part of making the book.
Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait (Rizzoli)
STIPE: It brings us to that whole Cartier-Bresson idea of a decisive moment, because with each roll of film, if you’re shooting large or medium format, you have 12 shots. With digital, you could just shoot a movie and then pick the frame that you want.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON : Yeah. I thank god I trained on film because I was forced into learning composition fast, and didn’t have the money to buy more film or to process. So you’re very quickly honing your eye and your skill to be able to nail an image within one, two frames. If you’re learning on digital, it doesn’t matter. You’re just like, “I’ll try it from every single angle.”
STIPE: And you’re going to get something. Especially if you’re shooting portraiture, if you’re working with people and you don’t even—
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: The bananas aren’t in, are they?
STIPE: The bananas? I didn’t see the bananas.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Damn. We were in a cafe together in Berlin, and they just had this string with a giant group of bananas hanging on the end. Everything about it was so great.
STIPE: You had me go back twice because the picture that you got wasn’t good enough. So I went back and photographed these bananas several times over the course of a few months and sent the images to you to use in your hanging pictures.
STIPE: And then they don’t even show up in the book.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: But they’re in the Wired series where I’m hanging from cranes in Joshua Tree. There’s a hanging bunch of bananas. It’s just such a weirdly pertinent, poignant image of something that means nothing and everything.
Sam Taylor-Johnson, Escape Artist (Multicoloured), 2008, Courtesy Sam Taylor-Johnson
STIPE: When I took those pictures for you, I was not allergic to bananas. And then I discovered on a flight that I’m allergic to bananas, and my throat closed on the plane. That was not pleasant.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: How the hell does somebody develop a banana allergy?
STIPE: People that are allergic to bananas tend to also be allergic to avocados and latex. I’ve always had a latex allergy, so it just developed. It happens after 50.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: No extreme fetish for you. No latex and bananas. Wait, hang on. What I like about today is that you’re recording new music, I’m making new photography, and we’re talking about two ends of the spectrum of creativity, joined at the hip by a bunch of bananas in Berlin. And there’s a photograph of you in the book.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: We met in 2005, backstage, when you were doing the Live 8 concert and you had a big blue stripe across your face. We’ve been friends ever since. The photograph of you is in a church in the south of France, in a place called Saint-Paul-de-Vence. It’s just an absolute moment of light hitting you in the most celestial way, in a sort of spiritual moment.
STIPE: I look like the saint of light. It captures my ears in a way that makes me very proud. I love my ears, but with a slight shift down or up they look really weird. Here, they just look proportionate to my face and my head.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Your ears look great. One blue, one white.
Sam Taylor-Johnson, Michael Stipe, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 2024, Courtesy Sam Taylor-Johnson
STIPE: We’re back to the decisive moment, which I want to debate and talk about. It’s kind of punk, but there’s a discipline you have as an artist. You’ve combined this “Fuck it, whatever happens” attitude and approach with a very disciplined, rigorous idea of what constitutes art. Can you discuss that?
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Both you and I throw our creative force behind different disciplines—you with music, art, photography, writing. Similarly, at the moment, I’m more in the head space of photography, but I’m actually writing a lot. Which is so interesting because I’ve never written, but I always tell stories.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: With films, I’m always telling other people’s stories. Now, it’s time to write and tell my own story. Writing is such an interesting practice compared to making films, art, photography, which all across the board, require exactly what you’re saying—a decisive moment. Like, you standing there a second ago in the studio and the way that that light was illuminating the side of your head—there’s the moment. With writing, it’s such a different discipline. It’s so infuriating, but you can get into this almost shamanic flow.
STIPE: That’s what I’m talking about. Write drunk, edit sober.
STIPE: Not literally drunk, but write with complete abandon. Don’t question anything that’s coming out of you. Trust that whatever it is is bigger than you, it’s beyond you. You’re a vessel pulling it down from somewhere.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: 100%. Sometimes I reread things I’ve written. I’m like, “Who the hell wrote that?” I’m writing things from experience and memory, but there’s a voice that comes through that is something else. Sometimes it’s finding that, tapping into that, and being present for it. And sometimes you lose your presence of mind, and then you’ve lost that channel of thought and creativity.
Sam Taylor-Johnson, Fuck Suck Spank Wank , 1993, Courtesy Sam Taylor-Johnson
STIPE : You’ve managed to do that and also be a mother of four, and very successfully so.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Thank you. I love being a parent. My kids are at a point where they don’t need me, and it’s a massive adjustment. I’ve been a mother, hands-on, with kids around me, for the last 29 years. This trip to New York right now is the first time I’ve not had kids because they’re at school and working. I was like, “Fuck, I’m redundant.” It’s actually like being fired.
STIPE: That’s hysterical. When you get fired in Britain, you’re made redundant. Brutal.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Yeah. I felt this massive tsunami of grief, but then, very quickly, freedom! This New York trip is the first time I’ve felt like I can just free-form and flow. It’s an interesting moment because a lot’s been happening. The book’s coming out. The show is in Atlanta. My kids made me redundant. But there’s a whole new world opening up through having this time. Having this show, it seems to have been some sort of other-universe collusion to make this all happen at the same time.
STIPE: I’m going to ask an uncomfortable question, and then based on how you answer, it will either be off the record or not.
STIPE: Almost everyone in this book is someone who’s a well-known public figure. What is your relationship with fame?
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: It’s not an uncomfortable question at all. It’s a fascination with people at the height of their creativity. In the case of Crying Men , I shot that 20-odd years ago, and there wasn’t really the conversation that there is now around male vulnerability. People couldn’t understand that I was trying to look at male vulnerability through the female gaze and capture the power of fame brought down to a human level.
Sam Taylor-Johnson, Crying Men (Laurence Fishburne), 2002, Courtesy Sam Taylor-Johnson
STIPE: Every single one of these men are very accomplished actors. As viewers, we’re looking at this and going, “Are they acting or are they not?” Maybe you don’t know.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: I won’t tell you. I made a vow with each person that sat in front of me. Some were like, “Oh, just give me the tear stick. I don’t care.” There was one actor who was crying as he walked into the room. He was like, “Thank god. I didn’t want to sit here and smile and pretend to be something else. I feel this, and I am so happy to give it to you.” And he just sat and wept, and I was like, “Wait, I haven’t even got the film in my camera!”
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Always be prepared. I didn’t take into account, through my own naivety of starting a project, that I was asking each actor to cry as themselves. There was no narrative structure for them to fall back on, no sense of a character. So, certain people were just like, “Well, how do I do that?”
STIPE: This is before you became a film director.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Yeah. Steve Buscemi was like, “I don’t want to cry. I’m really happy today. It’s a sunny day. You’re going to ask me to cry?” It took three years to make that. I’d gone through a really heavy period of illness, and I felt like making this was my own processing, like I was putting them through the grieving process for me.
STIPE: Wow. After that three-year project was done, did you feel it did the job?
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: It did not do the job. But it came out with a great project.
STIPE : I want to say “release,” but that’s not the right word. Catharsis—that’s the word I’m looking for, yeah.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON : Yeah. I hope I answered your question succinctly.
Courtney Love , 2004, Courtesy Sam Taylor-Johnson
STIPE: Totally. Lynsey Addario, the brilliant conflict photojournalist—I think that’s how she calls it—wrote an essay for the book. She’s a dear friend of yours, and you actually introduced me to her.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Yeah. She’s one of the bravest people I know. She goes right to the front line. She once called me from the basement of a house in Ukraine and said, “Do you want to get your nails done on the weekend?” I was like, “Yeah, why are you whispering?” She’s like, “I hear Russian soldiers upstairs.”
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: She is a fierce documenter of our greatest conflicts right now in the world.
STIPE: So there’s Lynsey, you, and then we have Tracey Emin. Where’s Tracey?
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: It’s near the end. Tracey wrote an essay. We’ve been friends since day one of the gloried art days. She sat down and wrote a really beautiful essay about our friendship, and reflected on me as an artist through her eyes. It’s such a gift to have somebody sit and write that for you.
STIPE: For the Young British Artists crowd, you and Tracey were the chicks, right? Along with who else?
STIPE: So in this very patriarchal cultural setting—contemporary art—you guys were the chicks. There’s that shared history that is very powerful. The three of you have made it through not only the different things that life has thrown at you individually, but you’ve also stood up, you’ve presented yourself as artists, and you’ve all succeeded in very different ways. It’s amazing.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON : Yeah. It felt like there was a band of women artists. We just kind of burst forth into a landscape that was ours. But going into the film industry was like, “Oh, I’m one of 4%.” The film world felt fresh as a woman. It felt interestingly archaic compared to the art world. And the obstacles there were so blatantly alive and active that you just go, “What, really?”
Sam Taylor-Johnson, Tracey Emin , 2012, Courtesy Sam Taylor-Johnson
STIPE: The institutions within that particular entertainment industry are so locked in. But you blasted into each industry. I mean, with the Young British Artists, you were just this shining star. It’s like, “What the fuck? Where did this come from?” You were truly punk with that. And then with film, it’s like, Fifty Shades of Grey ? As a lark, you auditioned for it or whatever.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Yeah. I didn’t even read the book. Never said that out loud, by the way.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: When you battle extreme illness, those sort of things don’t scare you. There’s no fear around any of that shit. The fear is walking through hospital doors. It’s not through going on set with a hundred people saying, “What do we do today?” That is a gift, and it’s an amazing thing. And then also, making music videos with you. We did “Überlin” and “Your Capricious Soul.” Aaron [Taylor-Johnson] says he gets more jobs off of “Überlin” than he does off any [project]. It’s one of the best things both of us say we’ve ever done.
STIPE: I’ve been making music videos since I was 20 years old, and I have to say, those two are in my top ten. Looking at it from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know us or our relationship, there’s a humanity that is just resonant. There’s authenticity. And that’s what, in a way, my music has to offer that’s different from what a lot of people do. And you can feel it. It’s energetic.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Yeah, it’s energetic. So we’ll do more.
STIPE: I’d love that. Thank you. I have some really good ideas.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: Yay! Michael’s got new music. It’s so exciting.
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