The first monograph of trailblazing photographer Anastasia Samoylova is a vital – and gently humorous – meditation on environmentalism, consumer culture and our disorientating times

Adaptation is the first career survey on Anastasia Samoylova, one of the most dynamic image makers to have emerged in recent years. Bringing together her six major bodies of work, it reveals the enormous range of artistic influences and ideas that inform her art, as well as the threads of connection that unite them. While each series explores different themes, they share a formal beauty, a masterly use of colour and an original approach to visual culture for which she is rightly celebrated.

Russian born and now a native of Florida, Samoylova moves between observational photography and studio practice, often incorporating collage and painting. Her virtuoso compositions are layered meditations on an everyday life made precarious by rising sea levels, image overload, gentrification and corporate culture. This is a provocative vision of the 21st century, at once sublimely beautiful and incisive in its assessment of the challenges we face.

About the Author:

Anastasia Samoylova is an American, born in the USSR in 1984. Her previous books include Floridas (2022), Flood Zone (2019) and Image Cities (2022). David Campany is a renowned writer and curator with particular expertise in American photography. His many books include William Klein: YES (2023), The Open Road: Photography and The American Road Trip (2014) and Walker Evans: the Magazine Work (2014). He is Curator at Large for the International Center of Photography, New York. Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, artist and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Mia Fineman is Curator of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Shortlisted for The Photographer’s Gallery’s Photography Foundation Prize

FloodZone is Anastasia Samoylova’s photographic account of life on the climatic knife-edge of the southern United States. Serious climate change is upon us, but this is not a visualization of disaster or catastrophe. These beautifully subtle and often unsettling images capture the mood of waiting, of knowing the climate is changing, of living with it. The color palette is tropical: lush greens, azure blues, pastel pinks. But the mood is pensive and melancholy. As new luxury high-rises soar, their foundations are in water. Crumbling walls carry images of tourist paradise. In the heat and humidity nature threatens to return the place to tangled wilderness. Manatees appear in odd places, sensitive to environmental change. Liquid permeates Samoylova’s urban scenes and unexpected views: waves, ripples, puddles, pools, splashes and spray. Water is everywhere and water is the problem. Mixing lyric documentary, gently staged photos and epic aerial vistas, FloodZone crosses boundaries to express the deep contradictions of the place. The carefully paced sequence of photographs, arranged as interlocking chapters, make no judgment. They simply show; elegant, sincere, acute and perhaps redemptive.

The coast of the southern United States looks and feels like a paradise, but all is not what it seems. As sea levels rise and hurricanes threaten, the beauty of the place becomes bittersweet. The future is uncertain but life goes on. FloodZone is a book about living with the contradiction.
Anastasia Samoylova

About the Author:

Born in Moscow in 1984, Anastasia Samoylova moves between observational photography, studio practice and installation. She has exhibited at the Aperture Foundation, New York; the Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston; and at festivals in Brazil, Belgium, France, Holland, China, South Korea and Germany. Samoylova has published her work in Smithsonian Magazine, FOAM, Art Press, Monocle and Bloomberg Businessweek.

A photo-dialogue on Florida past and present

Sunshine state. Swampland paradise. Tourist aspiration. Real estate racket. Refuge of excess. Political swing-state. Subtropical fever dream. With forms of nature and culture found nowhere else, Florida is unique. It is also among the most elusive and misunderstood of places. Anastasia Samoylova photographs Florida on intensive road trips. Walker Evans (1903–75) photographed it over four decades. Twisting the visual clichés, these two remarkably discerning observers convey Florida’s dizzying combination of fantasy and reality.

Evans witnessed modern Florida emerging in the 1930s, with its blend of cultures, waves of tourism, stark beauty and blatant vulgarity. He photographed there until the 1970s, making Polaroids that still feel contemporary. Samoylova inherits what Evans saw coming. With intelligence and humor, she picks her way through the seductions and disappointments of a place that symbolizes the contradictions of the United States today. In Floridas, photographs by Samoylova and Evans are presented in parallel, weaving past and present, switching between black-and-white and color imagery, all complemented by an essay by editor David Campany and a visionary short story by celebrated novelist and Florida resident Lauren Groff.

Florida is as fascinating as it is deceptive, a place of wild cliché and deep complexity. Walker Evans and Anastasia Samoylova have been two of the state’s most acute and thoughtful observers. In this book their photographs are seen in rich dialogue across the decades. Florida cannot be explained but these smart and playful photographers are the perfect guides to the puzzle. - David Campany

About the Authors:

Born in Moscow in 1984, Anastasia Samoylova moves between observational photography and studio practice. Recent exhibitions include those at Kunst Haus Wien, Kunsthalle Mannheim, USF Contemporary Art Museum, the Orlando Museum of Art, The Print Center and the Chrysler Museum of Art. Her work is held in the Wilhelm Hack Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among other collections. Steidl published Samoylova’s FloodZone in 2019.

Walker Evans (1903–75) is an acknowledged master of photography whose diverse body of work continues to shape our understanding of the modern era. Evans began photographing in the 1920s, moving quickly to define his aesthetic and subject matter: straight and sober images of American everyday life and its environs. Within a decade he had produced some of the most significant photographs of the twentieth century, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and published two landmark books: American Photographs (1938) and Let us now Praise Famous Men with James Agee (1941). Evans wrote art and film reviews for Time (1943–45), was employed by Fortune between 1945 and ’65 and taught at Yale thereafter. Steidl has published Lyric Documentary (2006), Walker Evans: the magazine work (2014) and Double Elephant (2015).

Imaginaries in reality photography's role in the visual culture of the city

Image Cities is the latest project of photographer Anastasia Samoylova. In the series, carried out in cities across the globe, Samoylova studies the proliferation of photographic images in urban environments. She observes how in our neo-liberal era of networked economic markets and networked imagery the global centers of internationalized money and culture are becoming increasingly aligned and similar. At the same time, however, these cities attempt to promote their individuality, often by repurposing their specific histories. Samoylova’s work reveals how the cities she photographs are moving towards a generic urban landscape of anonymous steel and glass, and it also points to the role photography plays in creating this ideological gap between branded urban identity and lived reality.

About the Author:

Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984) lives and works in Miami, Florida. Her photographs have been shown at museums in Europe and the USA. She is the winner of numerous prizes including the Fundación MAPFRE’s KBr Photo Award (2021).