Bio
Anastasia Samoylova moves between studio practice, observational photography, installation and public art projects. Although her work takes many forms, a central concern is the place images occupy in our understanding and misunderstanding of the world. The epic project FloodZone, photographed in the Southern United States, reworks our expectations of coastal paradise into a psychological portrait of communities faced with rising sea levels. Noting how the corporate imagery of tourism and the real estate boom mask the realities of a land in crisis, Samoylova developed a way of photographing that carefully opens up the dissonance. She pushes the lush color palette and seductive iconography of the region until it becomes its own critique.
Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984) is a Russian-born American artist. Upon relocating to Miami in 2016, Samoylova pursued observational photographic practice, leading to her first incisive major monograph, FloodZone (Steidl, 2019), which formed a study on the visualization of environmental threats posed to flood-risked communities in Miami and beyond. In her Floridas (Steidl, 2022), she gestures toward the state of Florida itself, forming a kaleidoscopic and contradictory portrait of how the state’s unique cultural and political psyche manifests in visual form. In 2023, Samoylova published Image Cities (Fundación Mapfre / Hatje Cantz), in which she trained her lens globally within some of the world’s most significant urban centers while examining the images that cover their surfaces. Recent solo exhibitions include C/O Berlin, Fundación Mapfre, Eastman Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, and Kunst Haus Wien. In 2022, Samoylova was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her work is in the collections of the Perez Art Museum, Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among others.
