Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta has opened “She Was I”, a solo exhibition by artist Sam Taylor-Johnson devoted to her career-long investigation of identity and the self. The show, which opened on 22 October, brings together photographs and films centred on self-portraiture and runs through 23 January 2027.

At its heart is the Crying Men series, made between 2002 and 2004, in which more than two dozen actors were invited to sit for portraits in moments of private reflection. The vulnerability of those sittings has become one of the defining images of Taylor-Johnson’s practice, and the series anchors a display that also includes portraits of family and friends.

The exhibition traces the arc of that practice from its beginnings: early black-and-white student photographs made in London in the 1990s, through the Crying Men portraits, to “Wired”, photographed in Joshua Tree, California, in 2020. Films and photographs throughout examine how her approach to the portrait has evolved.

Family and friends appear alongside the actors, so the show reads as a single sustained inquiry rather than a greatest-hits display: the same questions about who we are when we look at ourselves, asked first in student darkrooms, then in front of a camera with strangers, and now in films as well as still images. The monograph that accompanies the show extends that inquiry onto the page, pairing reproductions with the arc of a practice that has moved between photography and cinema without ever leaving portraiture behind.

The show coincides with the release of her latest monograph, “Sam Taylor-Johnson: The Self and the Portrait”, published by Rizzoli. Taylor-Johnson, acclaimed as a photographer and filmmaker, has built her reputation on experimental work about identity, and this Atlanta presentation offers a rare chance to see that preoccupation unfold across three decades in a single room.