Inside ‘She Was I,’ Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Atlanta return

The photograph I’d take home from Sam Taylor-Johnson’s “She Was I” show, now on display at Jackson Fine Art through Jan. 23, hangs just inside the gallery door — center left. In “Phoenix, Rothko,” a girl stands in a room lit to look like a Rothko painting, her red hair set against stacked, glowing color blocks. The girl is Taylor-Johnson’s daughter, Jessie Phoenix Jopling.  The photo, though, is also a portrait of the woman behind the camera: a lifelong Rothko fan who has spent her career making light, and the rules, bend to her will. It’s a skill evident throughout “ She Was I, ” a survey of the British artist and filmmaker’s work that unfolds across three rooms. Family and friends greet you in the front gallery. Taylor-Johnson’s self-portraits fill a larger side gallery. And, in the back, hang the “Crying Men,” a series of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, from Paul Newman to Philip Seymour Hoffman, photographed in tears. Different faces, different rooms — and in every one of them, there she is. She shows up in how she sees them. Few of her subjects look directly at camera. Instead, they’re often caught mid-gesture, in moments that feel private: Ralph Fiennes’ hands in motion, Miranda July dancing. Even grief turns domestic. Philip Seymour Hoffman cries in a room so ordinary that an Atlanta artist standing next to me laughed that it looked like her mother-in-law’s house. So how do you curate a show where the artist is in every frame? Anna Walker Skillman, Jackson Fine Art’s co-owner and creative director, explains. Jackson Fine Art first showed Taylor-Johnson’s work in 2007. How did that happen? She was doing the cover of Elton’s “Peachtree Road ” album. Elton came to me and said, “Hey, would you be interested in showing some of Sam’s black-and-white landscapes of the South?” So, we did a show. How did you narrow down decades of work? Rizzoli came to her about doing a retrospective book. We printed the book out, one page at a time, on Xerox paper and laid them all out on the floor. That’s the way we curate. We edited and edited, and we sent her an edit, and she said, “I love your selection.” Tell me about “Phoenix, Rothko.” When we went to the High Museum, the first thing … [ Sam’s] like, “Are there any Rothkos?” So there is something. There is a thing connected to her and Rothko. And the portrait of Courtney Love hanging above the portrait of a fox? The fox is so confrontational, and in some way, Courtney Love is so confrontational. It’s one of those combinations that I don’t have any explanation behind, except visually, it was a match. There was an equality between the two, a power that they both held. So many portraits catch people mid-gesture. Why? Especially [Ralph] Fiennes. That was a portrait he absolutely did not like. But she insisted, in several different conversations, to allow her  to use it in the book, because she loved the hand gesture. She loved the motion. It showed a part of him, a portrait of him, that was not typical, but it was like him. There are a lot of hand gestures, … you have [Dennis] Hopper smoking a cigarette, or [Sienna] Miller with her hands up. For me, there’s a lot of movement.  …  And they have this kind of freedom that reminds me of Sam. What do you see of her in the work? She’s not taking the easy route. She’s getting herself tied up and hanging from different unsafe places. She’s peeling back the layers and showing the pain of very private images of her belly and her breast. She’s brave, but she’s also a fighter. Read More: • Art lovers Sam Taylor-Johnson and Michael Stipe open ‘She Was I’ photo exhibition in Atlanta • A daughter remembers: Leslie Parks Bailey on Gordon Parks’s ‘The South in Color’ Why does it matter to you to show this work now? .I’m excited to bring her back into the fold. As a woman, I’m always thinking about female artists and the responsibility of raising the children and then also doing your art, and then also being everything to everybody. I have such a deep respect for them. So it was such a pleasure to be able to have the first show of this work here. Her next show is going to be in Istanbul, in the museum. We were very lucky to be able to introduce it clean in Atlanta, and then the States. “She Was I” runs through January 2027 at Jackson Fine Art. “ Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait” (Rizzoli) is for sale at the gallery.