Anastasia Samoylova

ATLANTIC COAST (Aperture, 144 pp.) In 1954, American photographer Berenice Abbott set out to document the historic US Route 1, already predicting seismic changes to small towns and major cities along the route brought by the rapidly expanding Interstate Highway System. Inspired by Abbott’s acute and poetic observations on life along Route 1 and on the seventieth anniversary of her project, photographer Anastasia Samoylova ventures on her own journey to revisit those communities forever transformed by the interstate. Working in color and black and white, Samoylova provides a closer look at the American landscape irreversibly altered by the unrelenting expansion of industry, commerce, and development, as well as the displacement and tenacity of people and wildlife.

“It’s the kind of book that demands to be revisited, each viewing revealing new details and connections.”—All About Photo

“Samoylova’s photographs explore the enduring impact of Route 1 as a corridor of commerce, migration, and myth, revealing how the American landscape continues to be shaped by infrastructure, ideology, and illusion.”—PetaPixel

“...The photographer has a knack for keenly capturing the whole of Americana: its gorgeousness and ugliness, or what Abbott described as ‘its beauties and incongruities and all.’”—BOMB

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ADAPTATION (Thames & Hudson, 224 pp.) 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.

“In her paintings there are echoes of David Hockney, in the muted colours, and Peter Doig, whose work she loves, in the often semi-hallucinatory landscapes. At the Met, they will sit alongside Evans’s paintings from Florida.(…) As Adaptation illustrates, Samoylova’s creative imagination is restless and wide-ranging, her paintings and collages giving way to the more cerebral photographs in her most recent series, Image Cities.” - The Guardian

“Samoylova is no stranger to political volatility, and the book invites us to see the connections between the themes of humanity versus nature and nature with humanity. As she explores places, the artist reveals ideologies, ecology changes, regional values, and how they inevitably interlink . . . A beautiful photography book connecting how art can communicate intellectual topics and debates that help us shape a better environment.” - Musée

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IMAGE CITIES (Hatje Cantz / Fundación MAPFRE, 168 pp.) 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

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FLOODZONE (Steidl/D.A.P., 136 pp.) 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. 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.

“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.”- Tim Clark, 1000 Words Magazine

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