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
Venus Mirror, Miami, 2020
Koreshan Unity Settlement. Estero, 2020
Gatorama, 2020
Lost Wig, 2017
Chainlink Fence, Miami, 2018
Rusted Car, 2020
Beachgoer, Naples, 2021
Coconut Grove, 2017
Staircase at King Tide, Hollywood, 2019
Efflorescence, 2020
Porch, Key Largo, 2020
Flamingo Reflection, 2018
Blue Courtyard, Hollywood, 2019
Except Sunday, Panama City Beach, 2021
Presidents Hall of Fame, Clermont 2020
Pink Walls, Sarasota, 2020
Gun Shop, Port Orange, 2019
New Condominiums, Bonita Springs, 2021
Empty Lots, Mexico Beach, 2021
Beachgoer, New Smyrna, 2019
Reflection, Lake Placid, 2020
Car Reflection, Miami Beach, 2018
Road twice destroyed by hurricanes, Alligator Point, 2021
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.
When was the last time you did a Google image search for “landscape”? The results will be glorifying images begging to be paired with inspirational quotes. Holiday brochure exaggerations in saturated colors and just-too-perfect light. Conformist and conventional, such depictions are less about real landscapes than the feelings they are meant to evoke. The algorithms of popular taste and fantasy have taken to an extreme those notions of the sublime landscape that took hold in western art in the 18th century.
I search online copyright-free image libraries for various kinds of landscape pictures. Deserts. Glaciers. Tropics. Storms. Forests. Waterfalls. Mountains. These are collated, printed out, cut, folded, assembled as three dimensional studio sculptures, and then re-photographed. From immaterial data, to 2D print, to 3D environment and back to 2D print. The process is largely improvised, built up element by element, much the way we surf the Internet from one image to the next. The results are real world collages taking the form of still life tableau compositions of landscape types. Perspective is shattered in the manner of cubism or constructivism, each image contributing to the larger whole. But look closely and there’s also a world of imperfection here. Creases, props, dust, even reflections of the studio in which I work.
The Internet is primarily a picture-based environment with blurred geographical boundaries. My final images are thoroughly international indications of the emerging global order of beauty and landscape. There is something autobiographical in this: I was born in Russia and have lived in several different landscapes across America.
I like the idea that the work can be simultaneously liberated from realistic depiction, yet grounded in the material world. I pursued photography because like no other medium it points to a concrete reality, with its time and space. But, I came into it with the understanding that reality is a construct, and that I can “bend” time and space in one image. With photography you can make up a world and produce a truthful record of it.
From philosophy to Flickr, my interests were formed early on. I was an early adopter of online image sharing back in 2004. Today my photography is a documentation of my process of thinking about images and places. When you go out and see a vast landscape and you take a picture of it, you shrink it to something flat and small. I’m trying to bring it back to life, to enjoy it, and to push it in ways that make it thinkable again.
2015, archival pigment print, 30x40 inches, edition of 5
2014, pigment print, 30x40 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 30x40 inches, edition of 5
Triptych, archival pigment print, 100x45 inches
2014, archival pigment print, 24x36 inches, edition of 5
2015, archival pigment print, 30x40 inches, edition of 5
Archival pigment print, 32x40 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 24x36 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 24x36 inches, edition of 5
2015, archival pigment print, 24x36 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 24x36 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 30x30 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 24x36 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 24x36 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 24x36 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 24x36 inches, edition of 5
2013, archival pigment print, 30x33 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 20x24 inches, edition of 5
2014, archival pigment print, 30x40 inches, edition of 5
2015, archival pigment print, 30x40 inches, edition of 5
Archival pigment print, 30x30 inches
Timelapse video
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.
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