Flooded Street, Miami Beach, 2020
Archival pigment print
30 × 40 in | 40 × 50 in
Edition of 5
October 14, 2024
This photograph presents the kind of compelling paradox that has brought Anastasia Samoylova’s work such wide acclaim. The doubling of the lush trees and topiary, sensitively rendered in a wide range of tones, captures the attention first. This scene of disorienting beauty then unfolds into the more sobering reality of a residential street in Miami Beach subsumed by flood water. Samoylova’s work in Florida explores the way that the state's culture intersects with the impacts of climate change, a theme that grows more timely with every passing day.
Samoylova is currently featured in the two person show Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans at The Met, which opens to the public today. While her main focus is color photography, black and white shots have always been integrated into her bodies of work, a decision which reflects her engagement with photographers who developed the medium as an art form, Walker Evans in particular.
Like Evans, Samoylova has a keen interest in the way regional histories create their own unique vocabulary of vernacular forms and images. Samoylova's work is particularly focused on how cultural histories can drive events in our present day, sometimes to calamitous ends. As another great artist of the American South, William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans
October 14, 2024–May 11, 2025
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gallery 852
