Publications
Image Cities
IMAGE CITIES (Hatje Cantz / Fundación MAPFRE, 168 pp., $65) responds to the waves of increased consumerism and gentrification across capitals. In the book and accompanying exhibition at KBr Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, Samoylova constructs a dynamic and moving kaleidoscope of sights. Adverts and commercials mingle and overlap as they reach the point of rupture and disorientation. In these worlds thick with signs and symbols, the artist prompts viewers to venture into the urban world, to look more closely at their layered surroundings.
Chloe Elliott, Aesthetica Magazine
The viewer of Image Cities should expect to become disoriented, but in a manner that the artist, I feel, is intentionally creating: a certain myopic vortex where reality becomes helplessly blurred. The result is something like Blade Runner by Kubrick, which sounds unlikely, but there’s an interaction here between glitz and grit, between have and have not and what is and what was only ever imagined.
Christopher J Johnson, Photo-Eye Blog
In her latest work, Image Cities, this innovator of documentary photography has focused on the proliferation of advertising images in public spaces. Images on a monumental scale that are integrated into the architecture, creating a strange effect, as ambivalent and contradictory as the times we are living through.
Gloria Crespo MacLennan, El Pais
Buy: ArtBook/D.A.P (English) ; Laie (Spanish) ; Photoeye (English, signed)
Floridas
FLORIDAS (Steidl/D.A.P., 191 pp., $65) is a fascinating project that juxtaposes photos of the state taken by Walker Evans mostly in the 1940s (as well as a few paintings he made a couple of decades later) with pictures made in recent years by the Russian-born Anastasia Samoylova. Many of Evans’s photos are unfamiliar, and some of Samoylova’s are in black and white, so that now and then the reader can be momentarily unsure who took what. The two photographers share an appreciation for the collage-like incongruities the state seems to offer in abundance, for the degree of artifice that produces them and the pictorial flatness they generate. But where Evans was chronicling a Florida on the verge of expansion from tourism and construction, Samoylova shows us a state already battered by climate change, not to mention overbuilding. They both enjoy the outlandish roadside attractions, the hot colors, the folk art, but Samoylova’s pleasures are tempered by the presence of gun culture, poisonous politics, and environmental destruction now and to come. Water is mercurially beautiful, as she shows in her shimmering reflected surfaces, but it will sooner or later cover everything.
Lucy Sante, The New York Times
Buy: Artbook
FloodZone
(Steidl/D.A.P., 136 pp.)
Necessary images from the frontiers of climate emergency in the southern United States make up this brooding exploration of the people, spaces and surfaces existing in preparation of its onslaught. Rising sea levels and hurricanes threaten but it’s the absence of any drama or action that defines Anastasia Samoylova’s FloodZone. Instead, as individuals wait and look on, conjured is an atmosphere akin to a mood piece laden with suspense and foreboding. Through a skilful blend of luscious imagery, encompassing lyrical documentary photographs and black and white studies – by turns staged and spontaneous – along with epic aerial views, and touching upon issues of paradise, tourism, decay and renewal, FloodZone constitutes an inventive addition to the slew of recent approximate visions of the Anthropocene. As David Campany notes in the monograph’s essay, “Paradise is as photogenic as catastrophe.” And while “the seductive contradictions of a place drowning in its own mythical image” is indeed embodied, Samoylova’s is a fantastic double vision, proffering depictions that oscillate somewhere between the already seen and never seen.
Tim Clark, 1000 Words Magazine
FloodZone is Anastasia Samoylova’s photographic account of life on the climatic knife-edge of the southern United States. Sea levels are rising and hurricanes threaten, 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.
Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art
304 pages, 560 images
Vitamin C+ showcases 108 living artists who employ collage as a central part of their visual-art practice, as selected by 69 leading experts, including museum directors, curators, critics, and collectors. The survey also features an engaging and informative introduction by Yuval Etgar, an internationally renowned expert in the area.
Photography: The Whole Story
136 pages, 86 images
Photography: The Whole Story leads you through the world’s most iconic photographs – those images that have become key reference points in our conception of ourselves and the world around us.
