Sam Taylor-Johnson’s ‘Crying Men’ Photo Series Featured in Major Solo Exhibition

An exhibition presents the career-defining work of internationally celebrated British photographer Sam Taylor-Johnson, including a selection of works from her iconic Crying Men series.

Taylor-Johnson’s solo exhibition She Was I is on view at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta through January 23, 2027. The exhibition coincides with the publication of the photographer’s new monograph Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait, published by Rizzoli.

The exhibition explores Taylor-Johnson’s long-standing interest in identity and the self through photography and film. It centers on her self-portraits, beginning with early black-and-white photographs she took in London in the 1990s while she was a student.

More than a decade later, Taylor-Johnson returned to self-portraiture with images of herself suspended in her London studio, appearing weightless and seemingly held aloft by balloons. In Wired, photographed in Joshua Tree, California, in 2020, she makes the fragile support mechanisms holding her body above the ground an integral part of the composition.

The exhibition will also present Self Portrait in Dark Water, a more recent series in which Taylor-Johnson uses water to suspend her body in unusual positions. The series will be shown to U.S. audiences for the first time.

A selection of works from Taylor-Johnson’s Crying Men series will also be on view. Created between 2002 and 2004, the series features leading male actors whom the artist invited to sit before her camera in moments of private reflection. The portraits capture the subjects crying, exposing a more vulnerable side of their public personas.

Taylor-Johnson photographed more than two dozen subjects for the series, including actors Daniel Craig, Laurence Fishburne, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The images document the men in unguarded moments of emotion.

Alongside these portraits, the exhibition includes photographs of Taylor-Johnson’s family and friends in private, familiar settings. These works have a semi-autobiographical quality, offering another perspective on the relationships between identity, personal experience, and portraiture.

Together, the works in She Was I examine Taylor-Johnson’s career-long interest in the self and the ways in which the complexities of individual identity can be both revealed and concealed.

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s solo exhibition She Was I is on view at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta through January 23, 2027.