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“The first rule of hurricane coverage,” the Florida-based crime novelist Carl Hiaasen once quipped, “is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.”
In Anastasia Samoylova’s photographic series FloodZone, made in the immediate wake of the 2017 hurricane that wreaked havoc on Miami, palm trees are a less graceful symbol of the acute climate anxiety that lies beneath the city’s American dreamscape. Against the art deco facades of Miami Beach they often look abject: uprooted, upended and, in one unforgettable image, balancing precariously against a pale white building above a sickly pink pavement.
Samoylova, who was born in Russia in 1984, moved to Miami in 2016. Initially, she felt overwhelmed by the city’s “whirlwind of pastel, art deco and tropical imagery” and while roaming the city with her camera often found herself thinking: “How can this place even exist?”
Samoylov’s images often require the viewer to stop, ponder and slowly decode their disorienting subversion of scale and perspective: buildings and billboards tower over people; flooded hallways resemble swimming pools; an iguana climbs a shop window in which the photographer’s silhouette, surreally draped in foliage, is reflected. Throughout, there is the sense that voracious nature, in the form of creeping vines and curling roots, is reclaiming the city just as the late JG Ballard imagined it would in his ever more prescient 1962 novel The Drowned World.
In their dreamlike strangeness, Samoylova’s FloodZone images are neither documentary nor art photography but possess elements of both, while evoking the unsettling atmosphere of a world where life attempts to continue as normal in the face of impending existential catastrophe.
If FloodZone is her most celebrated work – it was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse prize in 2022 and has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe – a new book, Adaptation, is a chronological survey of her career to date. It tracks her creative continuum from Landscape Sublime, an early series of urban photographic collages made from copyright-free imagery she found on Flickr, to the ambitious Image Cities, in which she explores how globalisation has transformed the architecture and character of London, New York, Tokyo and beyond.
The publication of Adaptation marks a pivotal moment for Samoylova, who has just turned 40. In October, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will host an intriguing show called Floridas, contrasting her images of Florida with those made by the great Walker Evans between the 1930s and 70s. The following month, the Saatchi Gallery in London will host Adaptation, a survey show of her work (the new book is essentially a catalogue of the show). “It’s all so surreal,” she says, “especially the Met show – I’ll believe it when it’s up on the wall.”
Born in rural southern Russia, Samoylova trained in environmental design and architecture in Moscow, using a “faulty Zenith analogue camera” to photograph “grey blocks of Khrushchev architecture” in the city. She recalls how her mother saved enough money to buy the teenage Samoylova a digital Sony Cyber-shot F707, which for a time made her “the coolest kid on the block” as well as enabling her to make an early living as a photographer for hire. “I did events, but also actors’ portfolios and even advertising for brands like Harley-Davidson.”
Having obtained an MA at the Russian State University for the Humanities in 2007, she won a scholarship to study interdisciplinary art at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, whose agricultural landscape she describes as “acres of corn and soy fields with maybe a single barn and a grain processor”. After college, Samoylova taught there for several years until her husband landed a job in Florida in 2016. During an artist residency in Miami, she began making the work that became FloodZone.
Like everyone who visits the city, she arrived with an idealised notion of it from films, TV shows and tourist advertising. “Miami has a vivid, absorbed imagery that precedes one’s firsthand experience,” she says, “and that American dream idea is foregrounded in all the billboards that are now an embedded part of the architecture. The reality is very different and it reveals itself slowly only if you spend time there. That said, the reason I stayed outside so much making work was because my studio smelled so strongly of mould and stale cat piss.”
Samoylova’s initial idea was to create constructivist-style photographic collages, but she soon realised that her source material – the photographs she was taking on the streets – was a more intriguing expression of the city’s hyperreality. “In a way, Miami was perfect for me,” she says, “because it’s a life-scale collage in itself. I also wanted my photographs to reflect my own sense of disorientation.”
Landscape Sublime is an intriguing introduction to her way of working, one idea and medium giving way to another as she explores her subject matter more deeply. More intriguing still are the later paintings and collages made in Miami, which move freely from the figurative to the almost abstract. All are based on Samoylova’s photographs; some, like the self-explanatory Motel Room, 2024, are actually painted-over photographs. “That one was made during the Covid pandemic,” she says, “when I woke up one morning in this eerie green light that I tried to photograph, but the end result just did not deliver.”
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. “I love that he moved freely between photography and painting,” she says. “For me, it’s not that I consider myself a great painter, it’s more: why not? Plus, I found myself missing the sheer joy and sensuality of painting.”
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. Here, she explores the ways in which the often strikingly monumental images of female models that feature on advertising billboards and electronic displays in our global cityscapes commodify contemporary ideals of femininity and glamour.
“There is an element of Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment in there,” she says, telling me how she waited patiently to create a striking photograph of “two giant, AI-looking, hyperidealised women” who tower over an actual woman who has just popped out of the hairdresser’s for a quick smoke.
For her next project, she will expand her Floridas series, following Route 1 from Key West along the entire Atlantic coast, a marathon road trip that was made by one of her photographic heroines, Berenice Abbott, in 1954, for a book that was never published in her lifetime.
In all her work, Samoylova says, “there is always an underlying agenda that is political without being too obvious about it”. When pushed, she describes herself as “an activist, but only in terms of active communication and engagement with the viewer”. To date, Samoylova’s approach has been fearlessly ambitious in its formal range and its exploration of complex contemporary matters. “I want to defy expectations and pursue what the Russian artist Natalia Goncharova called ‘everythingism’,” she says, laughing, but deadly serious. Thus far, in pursuit of that impossible idea, Samoylova has nevertheless created a unified body of work that explores some of the defining issues of our time.
Adaptation is published by Thames & Hudson (£45). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. An exhibition of the same name is at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 5 November-20 January 2025
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