Last month, even with her long lens, Anastasia Samoylova didn’t particularly stand out among the several dozen people who had joined a boat tour of New York, many of whom also had cameras of all shapes and sizes trained on the coastal skyline.
While the Metropolitan Museum of Art was too far inland to see from the water, it was looming large for Samoylova, a Russian-born, Miami-based artist, as she talked and took pictures of the cityscape streaming by.
That’s because a new photography exhibition that opened this month at the Met is a career catapult for Samoylova, for whom milestones like a solo show at a New York gallery have remained elusive.
“Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans” gives Samoylova, 40, top billing over Evans, a 20th-century giant in American documentary-style image-making, in whose footsteps she has followed in Florida, even as she makes her own mark. The show, on through May 11, comprises nearly 100 works by both artists, mostly photos, but also paintings and collages.
The Met show establishes Samoylova as only the second woman to present such a sizable photo show at the museum during her lifetime; the last was in 1992 when the Met presented a retrospective of Helen Levitt — a mentee and friend of Evans — who was also relatively unknown then.
“Floridas” surveys what Mia Fineman, a Met photography curator who organized the show, described in a phone interview as “the continuities and discontinuities” in the state’s natural, cultural and political landscapes.
“Floridas” is based on Samoylova’s book of the same title, published by Steidl/D.A.P. in 2022, which paired images she made in her adopted state with ones that Evans created over 40 years of visits there. “The idea is to show a place throughout time and also certain timelessness of a place,” Samoylova said. Today, the state is a place that’s often a lightning rod, a focal point and a funhouse mirror, reflecting the rest of the nation.
Critic Lucy Sante, who praised the book “Floridas” in The New York Times, noted that “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.” (The book, edited by David Campany, includes a short story by a fellow Floridian, the esteemed author Lauren Groff.)
Evans — a Midwesterner by birth and a Yankee by choice — came to Florida, like Samoylova, with fresh eyes that immediately saw the state’s complexities and contradictions. On his first visit, in 1934, he described it as both “ghastly” and “pleasant” in the same sentence. He returned often, notably on a photo assignment for the book “The Mangrove Coast” (1942). That book is at the Met in a vitrine across from Samoylova’s “Venus Mirror” (2020), a photograph in which a mirror shaped like a woman seems to float in a decidedly Floridian commercial landscape. Samoylova shot the disorienting image through the window of an empty store in the Design District of Miami during the darkest days of the COVID pandemic.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell which of the two artists was behind the lens. Samoylova considers any possible confusion a compliment, though she didn’t exactly aim to emulate Evans; rather, she discovered the Met’s digital archive of Evans’ work while researching locations for her own shoots in Florida. She later secured permission to use his images in her book.
The Met show came about because Samoylova happened to have that newly printed book with her while at a photo fair in New York in 2022. As Fineman — the Met curator — walked by, Samoylova recognized her from social media and invited her to browse the book.
“I was so nervous to meet her, I just rambled,” Samoylova recalled. Ignoring the hubbub of the fair, Fineman slowly studied every single page, closed the book and suggested a show.
Fineman, who corroborated that account, added that what she sees in Samoylova “is an artist who has embraced the genre of observational photography but enriched it with a dynamic vision and way of putting pictures together.”
Samoylova’s path to success has not been linear. She was born in rural southern Russia, and the family moved to Moscow just as the Soviet Union began to dissolve. An only child, she was fascinated by the family’s faulty Zenith camera. When Samoylova was 16, her mother took on a one-year loan to buy her an early digital camera.
“I was drawn to landscape instantly,” she recalled during a day of conversation as — from aboard the boat — she clicked away at hulking industrial shapes beneath the skyscrapers along New York’s waterways.
“Also, because of that camera, I could get paid gigs.” She said that, as a teenager, she used an old, slow family desktop computer to teach herself Photoshop and how to color-correct those commissions.
But pursuing art seemed impractical, she said, “because I had to make money.” (Her family ran a small printing agency for business cards and the like.) Samoylova figured a degree in environmental design might marry the artistic and the pragmatic. And she was excited to help design and rebuild, sometimes literally, toward a democracy that then seemed possible to her.
“I caught the best time in Russia: the warming,” she said, almost wistfully. “Everyone was expecting it to turn toward progress. I had wanted to get on board with that.”
But as her country shrank away from that future, her interests shifted. As a college student, she built tabletop models alongside her classmates, but found herself less drawn toward realizing her designs and more toward documenting and distorting those designs with her camera.
“That’s what sparked my interest in art photography,” she said. She pondered what was constructed and what was a facade, and “how we shape places around us, how places shape us, what architecture means for a culture,” she said — ideas that remain among her chief artistic preoccupations.
While still a student, she said, she got a job designing window displays for Armani/Casa, the upscale home store, that arrived in Russia as the country was embracing the shiny side of capitalism. Samoylova liked how the store window served as a “container” for a scene with a shallow depth of field, and she has kept those elements in her pictures even now, as opposed to the horizon lines or aerial views commonly seen in landscapes. (She was delighted to learn later that Warhol, Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist had also dressed windows.)
She said that Armani/Casa’s operating company in Russia, the Mercury Group, began booking her to photograph jewelry, events and fashion shows, and brought her to London, Milan and Paris. Though neither a global representative for Armani/Casa, nor a representative of the Russian-owned Mercury Group, would verify to the Times details of Samoylova’s employment, images and links Samoylova shared from her work sparkle with the gloss of that era, and she said that with every travel assignment, she carved out time to build a portfolio of art photography. Thanks to that portfolio, she landed somewhere more exotic for her: Peoria, Illinois, where she became a teaching assistant, earned a master’s degree in fine arts and taught at Bradley University.
She was considering how to stay in the United States once her student visa ran out (“I literally bought myself a book on goat farming”), when a local community college hired her for its photography program. She earned tenure, then decamped to teach at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in rural Massachusetts. All along, she said, she volunteered at art fairs and festivals in far-flung places to make connections, get portfolio reviews and garner recommendations for art residencies. The move to Miami came after two residencies in Florida.
Samoylova is still shooting in Florida; her boat tour of New York last month was a stop on a long journey up the East Coast for a new project. This time, the inspiration is Evans’ friend Berenice Abbott, another pioneer in documentary photography. Samoylova aims to honor the 70th anniversary of Abbott’s “Route 1” road trip photos, which memorialized communities and cultures from Florida to Maine.
To do that, Samoylova is now traveling roughly the same route, photographing not only from New York’s waterways, but also in Baltimore, where the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed this spring, and in South Carolina, where Hurricane Helene hit last month. Some of those images will become a body of work to debut as “Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast” at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Nov. 15, 2025, to March 1, 2026). The show is set to head to the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in fall 2026, and, Samoylova added, “We hope to travel the show along the whole East Coast.”
Back on the water, on the tour that was intended to show how the climate crisis is already changing the landscape around New York, the boat slid under a rust-encrusted bridge. Samoylova steadied her sneakers on the bow, looked up at the bright sky visible through the grids and brought the camera up to her eye, saying, “This is epic.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2024 The New York Times
