Anastasia Samoylova

Anastasia Samoylova’s Image Cities represents a sprawling international tour through the world’s most significant urban centers, which together form a powerful interconnected global network of cultural and economic influence.

Throughout 17 cities, which include New York, Paris, London, Zurich, Tokyo, and Milan, among others, Samoylova trains her lens intently on the public-facing images that saturate the surfaces of these metropolises and forms a critical and lyrical study of how such images exert their influences on urban inhabitants. In doing so, the artist shows us not what is unique to these places but what is the same: The ominous and creeping homogeneity of commodity culture that is manifesting from an increasingly corporatized planet.

When we walk through the streets of a major city, we absorb the environment as a part of our identity. Who we are and who we become is so often realized by where we are and the influences of culture and values that surround us. What does it mean to be a New Yorker, exactly? Or a Parisian? The notion of local heritage is one that has traditionally guided our orientations toward the rest of the world. However, what we find in Image Cities, and what Samoylova urgently attempts to warn us of, is that when our environments change and become draped in the cloth of a larger globalized culture, we very likely will change along with it.

The city speaks to us as we walk its streets, and in Image Cities, Samoylova interprets its messages. Thick with advertisements for watches and blouses, billboards flaunting shiny and expensive goods, and construction banners that offer us hopeful glimpses of how old buildings will transform into new luxurious oases, the city becomes an arena of promises that beckon from all directions. As we continue our deep march into the 21st century, we should be well aware that pictures are such promises - of a better life, of expensive ideals - which direct us with feelings of glamor and aspiration. Much of what we encounter in our daily lives is guided by the slick aesthetic templates of contemporary image makers. This is the song of a corporatized world, and these are the values it urges us to keep closer.

The culture of commodities now circulates the globe, and the city is now an ideological battleground between the local and the global, between community and the aspirational self. We are the target of such advancements, caught between forces beyond our control. The immediacy of visual communication is difficult, if not impossible, to defend against, and so provokes an important question: Is it possible to prevent the influences of commodity culture from penetrating us? If we fight back against such visual persuasions, perhaps it is only in the production of new images that we can counteract the spells of rhetoric that so frequently tempt us.

While absorbing and reflecting on these core themes, Samoylova’s aesthetic tactics form a unique lyrical and symbolic visual play. Throughout her images, the artist employs collage-like pictorial strategies that hybridize figure and environment. It is a visual language made possible with the use of a telephoto lens - an antithetical tool to street photography’s traditions, yet one which allows the artist to compress visual space and muddy the distinctions between figure and ground. Throughout Image Cities, this mode of visual synthesis makes it difficult to separate the singular human and the cultural constructions which surround them, mirroring the symbiotic relationship between product and consumer.

In the end, what Image Cities becomes is a portrait of the quickly advancing optimism that the conglomerated corporatized world thrusts upon us. They ask us to abandon the old and embrace the new, yet the question of why such change is important to begin with is one that these messengers hope we avoid at all costs.

The Florida in Anastasia Samoylova’s Floridas is plural, multitudinous. A collection of photographs taken primarily on road trips between 2017 and 2020, she’d gone to look for the Florida that mystified her and so many others—including Walker Evans, whose images of the state appear alongside her own throughout the book’s pages. Samoylova found many Floridas during her search, none wholly complete without the others.

There is a profoundly American Florida, a violet state gone red, visible in Samoylova’s images of gun-emblazoned buildings and archetypal “Florida Men.” There’s the concurrent origin and graveyard of nearly-realized dreams, found in her photographs of eroding shorelines, sinking furniture, and the Founder’s Residence at the Koreshan State Historic Site—the heart of a now-dissolved utopian community. There is the sea—everywhere—flooding backyards and staining the streets, and the sun, illuminating and shadowing landscapes and advertisements for new apartments few locals can afford. The light is another Florida, exposing the place’s briefly hidden reality, then bleaching it away.

Much has been said about Florida’s obsession with its own image, an image so flimsy that even the rising prices of speculative real estate can’t hide the climate crisis threatening to drown the state’s southern half. Samoylova captures this tenuousness with grace and no judgment; she has spoken before of defending Florida, of loving it. When critics say Floridians are ignorant of their own impending demise, perhaps that naivete is, in truth, hope. In Floridas, you’ll find an ever-present Florida-pink, a sugary shade of rose that colors houses, fences, and sidewalks. Miami Beach’s Art Deco pastels, for example, were meant to soften the city’s criminal reputation into one of beauty; Florida-pink is often named the color of artifice. But it’s also found elsewhere: on the facades of homes in the Caribbean, the birthplace of so many Floridians, in renderings of a beating heart, in depictions of love itself. The artist Maren Hassinger once described pink as a color “with the power to compete with the green of nature.” Pink is steadfast. If the state sinks and the mangroves overtake what’s left of it, the rubble will compete with the green–painted the color of flamingos and just as alive.

Monica Uszerowicz

FloodZone is an expansive photographic project reflecting and responding to the problem of rising sea levels. The project began in Miami in 2016, when I moved to the area, my first experience living in a tropical environment. It was the hottest summer on record. Through daily walks I began to realize how the city’s seductive tropical palette and quality of light concealed the growing dissonance between its booming real-estate market and the ocean’s encroachment on its shoreline. Ocean views are prized in the real-estate world, with little regard for building projects’ locations in high-risk flood zones. Investors seem to turn a blind eye to the reality that Miami is steadily slipping underwater. Miami Beach, in particular, is a striking case study: the artificial island boasts some of the most luxurious properties, but it is subject to regular flooding. Living in Miami is bittersweet: it looks and feels like a paradise, but the only secure roots belong to mangrove trees. 

Anastasia Samoylova’s Landscape Sublime examines the ways in which digital culture shapes our perception of nature. In an era of algorithm-driven aesthetics, online image searches for “landscape” yield an endless stream of hyper-saturated, idealized views—visual clichés that are less about actual places and more about collective fantasies. These images, curated by algorithms and shared across platforms, reinforce an aesthetic of the sublime that has been evolving since the 18th century, now accelerated by the circulation of digital media.

Samoylova engages directly with this process, sourcing copyright-free images of archetypal landscapes—deserts, glaciers, jungles, storms, waterfalls, mountains. She prints them, cuts, folds, and arranges them into sculptural compositions in her studio, then re-photographs them. In this transformation, images cycle through different states: from immaterial data to physical object and back to the flatness of a photographic print. The process is intuitive and fluid, echoing the way we navigate digital imagery—jumping from one visual fragment to the next, constructing meaning along the way.

These reconstructed landscapes resist seamless representation. Creases, shadows, studio reflections, and the physicality of paper remind us of the images’ origins—fabricated yet tangible. The fractured perspectives nod to Cubism and Constructivism, yet the materials are unmistakably contemporary, rooted in the aesthetics of the internet.

For Samoylova, Landscape Sublime is both an exploration of photography’s evolving role and a personal reflection on shifting geographies. Born in Russia and now working across different American landscapes, she is attuned to the ways environments are visualized, idealized, and manipulated. Photography has always been a medium that compresses time and space into a single frame; in her hands, it also becomes a way to unflatten and reanimate landscapes, questioning how we see and interpret the world around us.

Breakfast is the most casual and intimate meal of the day. What would it be like to have conversations over breakfast with these artists? I started to photograph these imaginary encounters, the books and breakfasts becoming new images.  Paying my respects while reflecting on how images enter one’s life, shaping physical and mental space. 

Sometimes photographing an image is a way to really get to know it. To study it through a lens, or within another image, is to really engage with it. So Breakfasts With is not so much appropriation as an act of homage and a recognition of the deep effects that photographs can have on us.

See more of Breakfasts:

Libération

Laurence Miller Gallery

British Journal of Photography