The exhibition presents a selection of works from the Image Cities project by Anastasia Samoylova, winner of the first edition of the international KBr Photo Award, launched by Fundación MAPFRE, on a biennial basis, in 2021.
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.
La exposición presesenta una selección de obras del proyecto Image Cities de Anastasia Samoylova, ganadora dde la primera edición del premio internacional KBr Photo Award, puesto en marcha por Fundación MAPFRE, con carácter bienal, en 2021.
Image Cities de Anastasia Samoylova representa una gira internacional en expansión a través de los centros urbanos más importantes del mundo, que juntos forman una poderosa red global interconectada de influencia cultural y económica. A través de 17 ciudades, que incluyen Nueva York, París, Londres, Zúrich, Tokio y Milán, entre otras, Samoylova enfoca su lente intensamente en las imágenes públicas que saturan las superficies de estas metrópolis y forma un estudio crítico y lírico de cómo tales imágenes ejercen su influencia sobre los habitantes urbanos. Al hacerlo, la artista no nos muestra lo que es exclusivo de estos lugares, sino lo que es igual: la ominosa y progresiva homogeneidad de la cultura mercantilista que se manifiesta en un planeta cada vez más corporativizado.
Cuando caminamos por las calles de una gran ciudad, absorbemos el medio ambiente como parte de nuestra identidad. Quiénes somos y en quiénes nos convertimos a menudo materializa en función de dónde estamos y las influencias de la cultura y los valores que nos rodean. ¿Qué significa ser neoyorquino exactamente? ¿O parisino? La noción de patrimonio local es la que tradicionalmente ha guiado nuestras orientaciones hacia el resto del mundo. Sin embargo, lo que encontramos en Image Cities, y de lo que Samoylova intenta advertirnos con urgencia, es que cuando nuestros entornos cambian y se envuelvan en la tela de una cultura globalizada más grande, muy probablemente cambiaremos junto a ella.
La ciudad nos habla mientras caminamos por sus calles, y en Image Cities, Samoylova interpreta sus mensajes. Repleto de anuncios de relojes y blusas, vallas publicitarias que hacen alarde de productos caros y brillantes, y pancartas de construcción que nos ofrecen vislumbres esperanzadores de cómo los edificios antiguos se transformarán en nuevos oasis de lujo, la ciudad se convierte en un escenario de promesas que atraen desde todas las direcciones. A medida que continuamos nuestra profunda marcha hacia el siglo XXI, debemos ser muy conscientes de que las imágenes son tales promesas, de una vida mejor, de ideales costosos, que nos dirigen con sentimientos de glamour y aspiración. Gran parte de lo que encontramos en nuestra vida diaria está guiado por las plantillas estéticas hábiles de los creadores de imágenes contemporáneos. Esta es la canción de un mundo corporatizado, y estos son los valores que nos insta a mantener más cerca.
La cultura del producto circula por el mundo, y la ciudad es ahora un campo de batalla ideológico entre lo local y lo global, entre la comunidad y el yo aspiracional. Somos el objetivo de tales avances, atrapados entre fuerzas más allá de nuestro control. De lainmediatez de la comunicación visual es difícil, si no imposible, de defenderse y, por lo tanto, provoca una pregunta importante: ¿es posible evitar que las influencias de la cultura de la mercancía penetre en nosotros? Si luchamos contra tales persuasiones visuales, tal vez sólo en la producción de nuevas imágenes podamos contrarrestar los hechizos de la retórica que tan frecuentemente nos tientan.
Mientras absorbe y reflexiona sobre estos temas centrales, las tácticas estéticas de Samoylova forman un juego visual lírico y simbólico único. A lo largo de sus imágenes, la artista emplea estrategias pictóricas tipo collage que hibridan figura y entorno. Es un lenguaje visual hecho posible con el uso de un teleobjetivo, una herramienta antitética a las tradiciones de la fotografía callejera, pero que le permite a la artista comprimir el espacio visual y enturbiar las distinciones entre figura y fondo. A lo largo de Image Cities, este modo de síntesis visual hace que sea difícil separar lo humano singular y las construcciones culturales que los rodean, reflejando la relación simbiótica entre el producto y el consumidor.
Al final, en lo que se convierte Image Cities es en un retrato del optimismo que avanza rápidamente y que el mundo corporativo conglomerado nos impone. Nos piden que abandonemos lo viejo y abracemos lo nuevo, sin embargo, la pregunta de por qué ese cambio es importante, para empezar, es algo que estos mensajeros esperan que evitemos a toda costa.
Sunshine state. Swampland paradise. Tourist aspiration. Political swing-state. Real estate racket. Refuge of excess. Sub-tropical fever dream. The place where image and reality become inseparable. With forms of nature and culture found nowhere else, Florida is unique. It is also among the most elusive and misunderstood of places.
Samoylova’s series Floridas documents it all in a layered portrait of contemporary Florida, while establishing a dialogue with the oeuvre of Walker Evans, the American photographer who documented the state between the 1930s and the 1970s. Like Evans,
Samoylova moves between color and black and white, looking closely at the telling details in landscapes, cityscapes, people, objects and interiors that speak volumes about culture and social values. With her vivid bright images and sharp juxtapositions, Anastasia Samoylova offers a test for endurance to the iconic American narratives of the American Dream.
Floridas seems to exist on the thin border between observational documentary photography and a crafted photo-collage. It is the way the artist frames the shot of her subject of choice, in combination with her loaded depiction of color, that creates a slightly surreal atmosphere — none of which is staged. Posters, storefronts, signs, and utilitarian objects are meticulously observed as silent reminders of the character of American culture as a whole.
Since 2016, Anastasia Samoylova has been travelling Florida on intensive, wandering road trips, from the Keys to the borders with Alabama and Georgia. She makes acutely observed photographs that distil our contradictions and confusions, looking for
unexpected resonances in familiar motifs. The images are visually striking but complex, with subtle references both to Florida’s conflicted history, and to the way it has been imaged by others. She portrays Florida in all its intensity as a stark place — culturally, politically, economically and climatically. In Samoylova’s imagery, it wears this starkness quite visibly. It is there in the fragile landscapes, in the precarious tourist industry, in the boom and bust of its cities, and on the faces of its residents.
The state of Florida has a reputation across the United States, and internationally, as an extremist place of extravagance, indulgence, hedonistic tourism and sunny retirement but the reality is very different. Its politics and culture are as mixed as its demographics, and in this it has become a microcosm of the divisions and difference of the country as a whole. This ongoing project is amounting to a nuanced portrait not just of Florida, but of contemporary USA more broadly. “I believe that what is happening in the extremes of Florida is happening across the country,” recounts the artist.
A book published by Steidl and edited by David Campany, including the images of Floridas and a selection of Walker Evans’ photographs, will be released in early February 2022.
Estado del Sol. Paraíso de pantanos. Aspiración turística. Estado político-oscilante. Hogar de la estafa inmobiliaria. Refugio del exceso. Sueño de fiebre subtropical. El lugar donde imagen y realidad se vuelven inseparables. Con formas de naturaleza y cultura que no se encuentran en ningún otro lugar, Florida es única. También se encuentra entre los lugares más esquivos e incomprendidos de los Estados Unidos de América.
La serie Floridas de Samoylova lo documenta todo esto en un retrato a capas de la Florida contemporánea, al tiempo que establece un diálogo con la obra de Walker Evans, el fotógrafo estadounidense que documentó el estado entre las décadas de 1930 y 1970. Al igual que Evans, Samoylova se mueve entre el color y el blanco y negro, mirando de cerca los detalles reveladores de paisajes, paisajes urbanos, personas, objetos e interiores que dicen mucho sobre la cultura y los valores sociales. Con sus imágenes vívidas y brillantes y sus nítidas yuxtaposiciones, Anastasia Samoylova ofrece una prueba de resistencia a las narrativas icónicas del Sueño Americano.
Floridas parece existir en la delgada frontera entre la fotografía documental de observación y un foto-collage artesanal. Es la forma en que la artista enmarca la toma de su tema de elección, en combinación con su representación cargada de color, lo que crea una atmósfera ligeramente surrealista -nada de lo cual está escenificado. Los carteles, escaparates, letreros y objetos de uso diario se observan meticulosamente como recordatorios silenciosos del carácter de la cultura estadounidense en su conjunto.
Desde 2016, Anastasia Samoylova ha estado recorriendo Florida en viajes intensivos y errantes por carretera, desde los Cayos hasta las fronteras con Alabama y Georgia. Realiza fotografías de aguda observación que destilan contradicciones y confusiones, buscando resonancias inesperadas en motivos familiares. Las imágenes son visualmente llamativas pero complejas, con sutiles referencias tanto a la conflictiva historia de Florida como a la forma en que otros la han representado. La artista retrata a Florida en toda su intensidad como un lugar austero, cultural, política, económica y climáticamente. En las imágenes de Samoylova, se muestra esta crudeza de manera bastante visible. Está ahí en los frágiles paisajes, en la precaria industria turística, en el auge y caída de sus ciudades y en los rostros de sus habitantes.
El estado de Florida tiene una reputación en los Estados Unidos e internacionalmente como un lugar extremista de extravagancia, indulgencia, turismo hedonista y retiro soleado, pero la realidad es muy diferente. Su política y cultura están tan mezcladas como su demografía y así, se ha convertido en un microcosmos de las divisiones y diferencias de todo el país. Este proyecto en curso equivale a un retrato matizado no solo de Florida, sino también del Estados Unidos actual en general. “Yo creo que lo que está pasando en Florida está pasando a través de todo el país”, relata la artista.
Un libro publicado por Steidl y editado por David Campany, que incluye las imágenes de Floridas y una selección de fotografías de Walker Evans, se lanzará a principios de febrero de 2022.
The title of the show is borrowed from her eponymous project started in 2016, a photographic series in which the artist seeks to respond to the environmental changes on coastal cities of South Florida.
The project is built upon a set of interrelated paradoxes: the seductive and destructive dissonance between the official iconography of the region, comprised by tourist and real estate advertising, and the stark daily realities of climate change; the ways of landscape and the sense of place are at once natural and constructed; and the way photography both records and crafts perception.
Although the project was prompted by the effects of a major hurricane, Floodzone avoids the over-familiar media imagery of ruin and disaster. Instead, there are photographs of the saturated topography, portraits of locals, and close-up observations of architecture, abundant flora and fauna. Samoylova’s images provide a broad yet acute perspective on what it feels like to live in at-risk areas while economic forces instill a sense of denial and disavowal. Her subject is the precarious psychological state experienced by those living in a paradise sinking towards catastrophe.
By playing self-consciously with the familiar motifs and palette of the region, her photographs work as complex allegories. They pick out scenes, situations and details that compress multiple meanings and implications, bringing to the surface the many ways in which the fate and self-understanding of South Florida is bound up with its self-image. Photography is key in the making and remaking of collective memories and imagined geographies. Floodzone is a contemplation of this, at a moment of significant transition. Floodzone has been featured in key publications as The New Yorker, Artforum and El País. The project is completed with a book, that was published by Steidl in 2019.
El título se toma prestado de su proyecto epónimo iniciado en 2016, una serie fotográfica en la que la artista busca dar respuesta a los cambios ambientales en las ciudades costeras del sur de Florida.
El proyecto se basa en un conjunto de paradojas interrelacionadas: la seductora y destructiva disonancia entre la iconografía oficial de la región, compuesta por la publicidad turística e inmobiliaria, y la cruda realidad cotidiana del cambio climático; las
formas en las que el paisaje y el sentido de lugar son a la vez naturales y construidas; y la forma en que la fotografía registra y fabrica la percepción.
Aunque el proyecto fue inicialmente inspirado por los efectos de un gran huracán, FloodZone evita las familiares imágenes mediáticas de ruinas y desastres. En cambio, son fotografías de la topografía saturada, retratos de lugareños y observaciones en primer plano de la arquitectura, de la abundante flora y fauna. Las imágenes de Samoylova brindan una perspectiva amplia pero aguda de lo que se siente al vivir en zonas de riesgo, mientras que las fuerzas económicas inculcan un sentido de negación y rechazo. Su tema es el precario estado psicológico que experimentan quienes viven en un paraíso hundiéndose hacia la catástrofe.
Al jugar conscientemente con los motivos comunes y la paleta de color de la región, sus fotografías funcionan como alegorías complejas. Seleccionan escenas, situaciones y detalles que comprimen múltiples significados e implicaciones, sacando a la superficie las muchas formas en las que el destino y la auto-comprensión del sur de Florida están ligados a su propia imagen. La fotografía es clave en la creación y reconstrucción de memorias colectivas y de geografías imaginadas. FloodZone es una contemplación de esto, en un momento significativo de transición.
FloodZone ha sido destacado en publicaciones como The New Yorker, Artforum y El País. El proyecto se completa con un libro publicado por Steidl en 2019.
The radiation-green cover of FloodZone, a new collection of photographs by Anastasia Samoylova, is half-filled by the belly of a swimming alligator, its suspended claws both graceful and menacing. The shape is recognizable but still novel for any Floridian, more likely to have seen gators from above. In another image, a manatee’s curved form embodies a dark, winding topography.
FloodZone evokes not so much the tension between Miami’s ecological precariousness and its irrepressible beauty as their intertwined unity. Upon her arrival to the city from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, nearly four years ago, Samoylova was struck by the fauna, how it crept into urban areas—an egret on a crosswalk, an octopus in a garage. “It reminded me of J.G. Ballard’s Drowned World,” she told me at her studio, as sun- starched as her images. “I questioned whether humans were ever meant to really inhabit this place.”
South Florida’s environmental history—of dredging and draining, the local ecology ever more endangered by development and greed—is not unique, although the landscape manifests the havoc with a particular urgency. Miami is sinking—or, the water is rising. The sea level around Virginia Key, a local barrier island, rises an inch every three years; Florida’s bedrock is porous limestone, which allows saltwater to flood the state from below. You see the damage in the sunny-day floods of high tides; in the ceaseless street-lifting construction; in the quickening gentrification of residential neighborhoods on higher ground, with the attendant displacement of older communities.
Samoylova was first seduced by Miami’s light and amused by its veneer—a city deeply invested in its own image. Advertisements for luxury high-rises show shiny images of pools and attractive couples, presumably oblivious of what’s to come. Samoylova knows something about artifice; as an architecture and interior design student in Moscow—her discipline was officially titled Eco-Art Design— she noticed that photographs of her own designs never quite captured their depth or complexity, rendering her work, she said, “in a completely different scale. Photography creates a separate reality.”
She moved to the US to pursue a degree in that medium instead; in 2013, she began her ongoing “Landscape Sublime” series, for which she collects and reprints the repetitive photographs of popular natural phenomena—what she calls “tropes in landscape photography, like waves crashing and rainbows”— available in the public domain, arranging them into staggering abstract collages. “Miami,” she realized, “was a life-sized collage of images.”
FloodZone lays Miami’s underlying fractures bare: street-level billboard renderings of new apartments are fenced off by rain-weathered chain-link and sidewalks fractured by flooding. Water is everywhere—Samoylova’s images show road and sky collapsing into one gray, reflective surface. In Miami’s Little Haiti district, a mustard-yellow mural is weathered by humidity; on Virginia Key, a boat seems transformed into a living thing, verdant with barnacles. In another photo, two women lean on each other, hair afloat with sea breeze. Though FloodZone largely highlights street scenes, there are people, too—most of them seemingly unconscious of Samoylova’s lens, though in fact she spoke to many of them.
“I’m shooting a project called FloodZone,” she told a man gardening in Little Haiti, encircled by bougainvillea. “I’ve got a flood story for you,” he replied, as did nearly everyone, she told me. In FloodZone, the ongoing destruction isn’t explicitly documented, only portended through signs of the porousness between our man-made world and the natural one surrounding it. It is always the calm before or after the storm: a child wading through a flooded garage, a bird stoically surveying an unusually high tide, the constant, always visible construction of condos for the wealthy—as familiar now in the city’s landscape as the water itself.
And the images are unabashedly gorgeous—which comes with a risk, Samoylova knows, of aestheticizing the climate change that is her subject. We’ve watched shorelines erode, seen the coral reefs bleach themselves white, felt the heat stretch summer into fall. In David Campany’s catalog essay “Coming Waters,” he asks, “What is it to live day by day on a climatic knife-edge?” FloodZone’s most incongruous scenes, like the roosters seen against the background of a Zaha Hadid skyscraper, make me giddy with pleasure.
Samoylova recalls a fellow photographer’s warning her not to feel “too much sympathy for the light,” but she couldn’t help it. She traces lines like a painter: the long neck of a flamingo, a fishing pole, a mangrove branch on which her young son balances at sunset. In my favorite image, blown mangrove leaves blanket a pool after 2017’s Hurricane Irma, transforming the scene into what Samoylova describes as a near-Monet.
At the studio, she recounted her own Irma experience, stuck in a flood zone on Miami Beach. Her family couldn’t evacuate before the roads became frozen with cars, the gas pumps depleted from Florida all the way to the Carolinas. In one of the book’s black-and-white spreads, an hourglass-shaped causeway looks almost severed by water, as if to suggest a long walk off a short plank. FloodZone reminds me of the Miami I don’t notice until I do: that the clouds sometimes create the illusion of a mountain range, that all the paint is cracking.