Anastasia Samoylova

Laurence Miller Gallery will debut Anastasia Samoylova's IMAGE CITIES—NYC at The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, May 20-22.

Anastasia Samoylova is rapidly becoming one of the most impactful photographic voices of her generation. Her most recent project, IMAGE CITIES, grew out of her acclaimed FloodZone body of work—specifically her photographs of the vastly scaled imagery and advertising that luxury developers would use to cloak their Miami construction sites. This new series takes an expanded view of this trend, widening the scope to a growing number of global cities, including her visual study of New York City which is presented here.

IMAGE CITIES looks at the way that, increasingly, large scaled photographic imagery has surpassed architecture as the defining feature of city-spaces. Taken together, this succession of glossy depictions expresses a kind of paean to the consumer culture that drives it, the ideology of luxury branding, and the capital that props up the new skyline of megastructures. Samoylova frequently refracts these scenes via windows and glass facades, suggesting a hall of mirrors where reality gives way to an endless reproduction of idealized images.

Samoylova was born in 1984 and grew up in Moscow where she earned a Master’s degree in Environmental Design from Russian State University for the Humanities in 2007. She moved to the US in 2008 and received her MFA from Bradley University in 2011. She lives and works in Miami, Florida and New York City.

Her FloodZone project began in Miami in 2016 and examines the increasingly visible impact of rising sea levels. FloodZone was published as a book by Steidl in 2019, which was praised in national and international press, including The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and others. The panel of judges for the first edition of the KBr Photo Award unanimously voted to award the prize to Samoylova and her series IMAGE CITIES. The project will encompass a number of European cities thanks to this award.

Anastasia Samoylova’s photography has been presented in a variety of solo museum and gallery presentations around the world, and her work is included in a growing number of public and private collections.