Sam Taylor-Wood, Soliloquy

I found this picture on a postcard at the Tate Modern years ago, when I went on a school trip when I was 16. I found it the other day so decided to do a bit of research and find out what it is all about. I’d always loved the style of this image, with the subject of the photography appearing as if asleep in a dark, dreamland.

Sam Taylor-Wood's video installations and photographs show human dramas and isolated emotional instances, showing tense social gatherings—people in solitary, awkward, or vulnerable moments. He often presents these psychologically charged narratives on a grand scale in room-encompassing video projections or 360-degree photographic panoramas accompanied by sound tracks.

This image is taken from The Soliloquy series with the photographs structured like Renaissance altarpieces, making specific art-historical references. This image, Soliloquy I (1998), shows the languid pose of a sleeping man, representing the dying poet in Henry Wallis's The Death of Chatterton (1865).

He called the collection Soliloquy from the name of the theatrical monologue during which an actor disrupts the narrative to directly address the audience. This state of disengagement is implied by the combination of large photographs (representing the conscious state of the subject), while the strip of smaller images shows a filmic tableau of the subjects’ subconscious fantasies.