From the amFAR Photography Portfolio, curated by Jack Pierson. Image size is 15 x 15 inches (38.1 x 38.1 cm). Paper size is 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm).

Sam Taylor-Wood (British, b.1967) is a photographer and filmmaker, considered a member of the group known as the Young British Artists. After beginning to exhibit fine art photography in the early 1990s, Taylor-Wood had her first solo exhibition in 1994. In 1997, she was awarded a prize for Most Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennale, and was then nominated for the Turner Prize the following year. In 2002, the National Portrait Gallery in London commissioned Taylor-Wood to create a video portrait of celebrity soccer player David Beckham. Because of her association with celebrities and various wealthy, high-fashion individuals, Taylor-Wood’s work has occasionally been criticized as being pretentious or vapid; however, her films and photographs frequently grapple with issues of identity and the division between public and private life, the external and the internal, and the tension created by those two realms of existence. For her series of photographs titled Five Revolutionary Seconds, started in 1995, Taylor-Wood used a rotating camera to take five-second shots while capturing a full 360-degree panorama. The resulting photographs are often over six feet in length, and depict various settings and characters. Despite their physical proximity, the figures appear distant and detached from each other, presumably lost among their own internal thoughts. Other well-known works by Taylor-Wood include Crying Men (first exhibited in 2004), a series of photographic portraits depicting tears and contorted expressions of male celebrities, and Still Life (2001), a brief, silent film showing the accelerated decay of an originally pristine bowl of fruit. Taylor-Wood’s work has been exhibited in various locations around the world, including the White Cube gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 2009, she directed and released Nowhere Boy, a full-length feature film about the adolescence of John Lennon.