Contact

Sam Taylor-Wood has spent a decade creating films and photographic works that extend the boundaries of their media. Contact allows us to explore the usually private or suppressed source images behind her public work. Originally conceived for London's fig-1 series, its 8 x 22 ft. wall of more than 2000 test prints and contact sheet images was photographed in detail at Bruce Mau Design, Toronto, for this project.
Gathered over the last five years, Contact's images show how Taylor-Wood has moved on from charged encounters of the mid-nineties - a protracted domestic argument, isolated individuals casually lip-syncing the lines of an opera, a woman soundlessly laughing and crying to camera - to less formal, increasingly seductive scenes. Here posed images that recall paintings by Velazquez and Mantegna - or the languorous pleasures of Japanese erotic prints - are placed side by side with magazine assignments and private photos, cropped, marked and scribbled on for her own puposes. Sensual in their delighted appreciation of beauty and nakedness, yet dispassionate in their formal rigour and precision, these photographs presented en masse are so fresh that they seem to glimpse the contemporary world as it is, not how we would like it to be.