I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed photographer, filmmaker and director, Sam Taylor-Johnson.

Born in Croydon and educated at Goldsmiths, where she was among the stars of the 1990s British art scene Taylor Johnson made her name with her non-narrative films, such as Method in Madness, where a young man appears to be having a nervous breakdown on camera; Hysteria of a young woman miming in hysterical laughter; or Breach of a girl who cries in silence – art that seems to be about our shared internal pain, and the performance we all put on in our everyday lives. In 1997, she won Most Promising Artist at the Venice Biennale, and in 1998 was up for the Turner Prize.

Sadly, cancer took over at aged 30, an experience that no doubt shifted the output of work in the early 2000s. Still Life was a film that showed decaying fruit, and others explored the threshold between life and death, fantasy and reality, and what it meant to confront our own mortality. She has especially looked at the real lives of celebrities, from an almost mythic lens, such as her film David, of David Beckham sleeping at the National Portrait Gallery – that I remember seeing aged 10 – and her incredibly moving series of famous male actors crying, from Philip Seymour Hoffman to Robin Williams – that is currently on view at the V&A’s Fragile Beauty exhibition, a phrase that so perfectly sums up so much of Taylor Johnson’s work, the complexity of performance and artifice, and the glamour and beauty of pop often masked by darkness.

Since 2009, she has become one of Britain’s foremost movie directors, making her feature debut with Nowhere Boy, a portrait of the early life of John Lennon, and most recently, Back to Black, that zooms in on Amy Winehouse fragile but enormously celebrated life, showing her as the human she was, who loved most in the world people and music…

I can’t help but see the correlation between Taylor Johnson’s fine art work and her movie work: that deep interest in intense stories that appear on the outer side as one, and on the inner as another. She gets to the core of the human condition through her work, and leaves us contemplating our own existence, how we view those whose music, voice and lyrics we know like they’re in the DNA of our fingertips, and I really couldn’t be more excited to find out more.

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LINKS:

Back to Black: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21261712/

Nowhere Boy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1266029/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_nowhere%2520boy

A Million Little Pieces: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427543/

Fragile Beauty at V&A: https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/fragile-beauty-photographs-from-the-sir-elton-john-and-david-furnish-collection

Crying Men series: https://hickeyguy.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/crying-men/

JFK photograph by Gary Winogrand: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/113229

David @ NPG: https://www.npg.org.uk/beyond/exhibitions/partnership/2019/coming-home-david-beckham

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield