Samuel David Bayer (born February 17, 1962) is an American visual artist, cinematographer, and commercial, music video and film director.

[1] In addition to Nirvana and Blind Melon, Bayer has shot and directed videos for Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones, the Cranberries, Green Day, David Bowie, Iron Maiden, Garbage, the Strokes, Metallica, Ramones, the Smashing Pumpkins, Justin Timberlake and My Chemical Romance, among others, in his trademark style.

In 2011, his Super Bowl spot for Chrysler, "Born of Fire", received multiple awards, including an Emmy and a Cannes Gold Lion.

Bayer's understanding of Hollywood's constant superficial dissection and scrutinization of women, lead him to strip his subjects of all artifice in order to provide an alternative view of womanhood in contemporary culture.

For studies of the female form, these women would not have existed in the mid-twentieth century prior to the sexual revolution of the 1960s when artists began to reconsider the body as a politicized terrain and explored issues of gender, identity, and sexuality which manifest in the work of photographers Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Larry Clark, Hannah Wilke and Nan Goldin.

Bayer enlarged the 4" x 5" film negatives into the series of twelve-foot-tall triptychs and ten-foot-tall diptychs in what was a deeply personal process, one that afforded him the benefit of complete creative control.