Enough to bring tears
Posted 2006. 11. 2. 18:34+ http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3844713a14297,00.html
Enough to bring tears
30 October 2006
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Sam Taylor-Wood is the British photographer who persuaded David Beckham to let her film him sleeping, and has brought tears to the eyes of leading Hollywood men. Emotions are what she does best and–with two bouts of cancer behind her – her own life has given rise to more than a few, writes Robyn Mclean.
Sam Taylor-Wood has reduced some of the world's most famous men to tears. She's handed out Kleenex to Robert Downey junior, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman and Daniel Craig, all of whom sat before her crying their eyes out.
She's crept around David Beckham's bedside filming him as he slept – something that might make good tabloid fodder if it weren't for the fact Victoria knew about it and was quite happy for this blonde to be there.
Taylor-Wood is one of Britain's hottest photographers. Married to her dealer and owner of London's White Cube galleries, Jay Jopling, she moves in A-list circles with the Elton Johns and Stella McCartneys. She has also beaten cancer twice, recorded with the Pet Shop Boys and lived in a commune. It's a life that has at times put her in the same media spotlight as the famous faces she captures.
But the flipside to becoming the subject is that eventually someone wants to claw you down from your pedestal. Jonathan Jones, art critic of Britain's Guardian newspaper, acidly described her focus on celebrities as "an experiment in shamelessness" and asked: "How long can this art flaunt its fake tan and still be praised as the real thing?"
Taylor-Wood is unfazed by such attacks, dismissing them in a "que sera sera" tone that dominates throughout our conversation – a conversation that starts with her announcing she thinks she is in labour. In the final stages of pregnancy, she apologises in advance for any heavy breathing.
She regrets she can't travel to be at the opening of her first New Zealand show, but likes the fact New Zealanders will be able to view the pieces from a more neutral starting point, given the fact we know so little about her.
"I find it easier to have the distance when I exhibit abroad," she says. "When you're exhibiting in your home country, you feel a lot more pressure because you feel everyone you know is going to see it. The press put you under a lot more scrutiny, especially in Britain, because they love to pull down a successful person."
The British public have been privy to some very personal aspects of her life. Her treatment for colon cancer shortly after the birth of her first child in 1997 was successful, but two years later she was dealt a second blow in the form of an unrelated breast cancer. A mastectomy and a long process of recovery followed. Taylor-Wood was unsure whether she'd ever want to take photographs again.
Her journey, for those aware of it, makes a "disinterested view (of her work) difficult", said art critic Adrian Searle in The Guardian – something Taylor-Wood agrees with.
"Exactly," she says. "I'm quite open as a person and that means people know a lot more about you and they take that with them when they view the work. One of the reasons I'm so open is because it informs the work sometimes, too. As much information as you can give people is actually a positive thing."
But that isn't always her motto. In the Crying Men series, the artist deliberately withheld information from her famous subjects prior to their photo shoots. She didn't want to scare them away by telling them she wanted to photograph them crying.
"None of them knew that was what they had to do. I thought if I put that in the letter I wrote they wouldn't turn up. No-one wants to have to go through something traumatic."
Most initially refused to take part, but were talked around. "Luckily, Paul Newman was one of the first I photographed, and having him on the list, I must say, did help persuade the others."
Watching down the barrel of a camera as the actors broke down was far more difficult than she had expected.
"I have to say when I photographed Ed Harris and he started to cry it was so intense and so moving that I was reduced to tears as well. At the end of it he asked me if I was OK.
"At first, I was quite naive, thinking, `Oh, they're actors, they can do it.' But most of them did trawl up emotional stuff to get to that point. Toward the end of it, I did start to dread walking into the room and making grown men cry the whole time."
She also deliberately withheld putting any kind of narrative with the images so exhibition-goers are forced to question whether the tears in front of them are real.
"You are looking at actors and you're wondering about the authenticity of the tears and whether what you're looking at playing out in front of you is real or is it something that is part of a bigger story ... you are also looking at something raw and emotional, so then you see them as (men), which is what I was trying to do, to take away that celebrity sheen."
Ideas come randomly for Taylor-Wood. Sometimes through a dream, sometimes from a desire to explore a concept that intrigues, of which Crying Men was a case in point. "Like how someone (can) point a camera at you and tell you to smile. Something that has always been in the back of my mind was how to point a camera at someone and say `cry', the opposite."
When the National Portrait Gallery in London asked if Taylor-Wood would do a portrait of David Beckham, she initially turned it down for the lack of an original idea.
"I couldn't think of a way of photographing him that hadn't been done before," she explains. "He's the most photographed man in the world practically, he's in every newspaper and magazine. It was really difficult to think of doing it in a way that was worthwhile in the context of my work."
However, once she is given a challenge, Taylor-Wood says, it brews till she can tackle it in a way she'll be satisfied with. The Beckham portrait became an example of this.
"Then I had the idea of him asleep. He's an athlete and such an active person, also such an iconic hero, so (I thought) it would be interesting to see him without any of that, just to see him vulnerable and sleeping."
Unlike the crying actors, Beckham was surprisingly open about being filmed and needed little persuasion.
"He was pretty good about it. He said, `Nobody has ever asked me to do that and it's an interesting idea'."
The film was shot not long after Beckham had signed with Real Madrid, with Taylor-Wood setting up her camera in a Madrid hotel room where he was staying with wife Victoria and their children.
"I let him think the camera was filming him for a long time before I actually did turn it on. I waited till I really thought he was properly dozing. We did it right after a training session so he was exhausted and could just fall asleep really easily."
The result was David, 67 minutes of Beckham looking angelic. She admits there was a disappointing lack of dribble, snoring and twitching.
Two works that have a special resonance for Taylor-Wood were taken as she embarked on her second battle with cancer. The brave Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit is a direct reference to her mastectomy, while Self Portrait as a Tree is one of the few pictures she took while in recovery.
She says she is happy to talk about dealing with cancer because she hopes her openness might help other young women facing similar hurdles. "Being able to talk about it stops you from burying it too deep. Sometimes I think it's quite healthy to talk about things like that. I felt the more open I could be, the less I carried it around with me."
Self Portrait as a Tree, taken in 2000 in Yorkshire, became a symbol of her journey.
"It was taken so randomly. I looked and saw the sky and that tree and thought it looked so extraordinary. I didn't really look at it for a year after, but when (I did) I really felt it best described what I was going through at the time."
David is the latest of several film and video works Taylor-Wood has made. One of her favourites, Brontosaurus, depicts a naked male friend dancing wildly, seemingly in his own world.
Shot before Taylor-Wood's reputation skyrocketed, it was later sold to London's Tate Gallery.
However, her friend struggled with the fact his nakedness was on display to such a massive audience.
"When we made it, we were working in bars and finding our way through life, you know, surviving on very little. When it was bought by the Tate and projected on a wall in a room next to a whole lot of (painter) Lucien Freuds, he found it really uncomfortable to be so naked and bare and so vulnerable. He found it quite emotional, actually."
But emotions are what this photographer does best. They have become a signature of her work. Rather than whinge about the pain of her impending contractions, Taylor-Wood enthuses about how excited she is. She can't wait for the next chapter in her remarkable life to arrive.