Upon moving from upstate New York to Miami Beach in 2016, Anastasia Samoylova soon began a project that culminated in FloodZone (2019), a photographic account of the effects of rising sea-levels and the tussle between an invasive city and the Everglades’ will to overcome it. She recalled, “It was the hottest summer on record. Through daily walks I began to realize how the city’s seductive tropical palette and quality of light concealed the growing dissonance between its booming real-estate market and the ocean’s encroachment on its shoreline.”
Born in Moscow in 1984, Samoylova received a graduate degree in environmental design from the Russian State University in 2007 and emigrated to the United States in 2008 with the intention of earning a photography degree. She did so, and like virtually all documentary photographers, came to regard Walker Evans (1903-75) as a genre-shaping icon. While working on FloodZone, she was surprised to discover that Evans had produced a significant body of work shot in Florida. Her encounter with those images triggered her next project, now published as Floridas, a joint collection of Evans’ and her photographs.
I turned to James R. Mellows’ biography Walker Evans (1999) to learn more about Evans’ sojourns in Florida but was disappointed by the sparse information. In his illuminating essay for Floridas, David Campany asserts that Evans “photographed Florida over a greater span of years than he photographed just about anywhere else. From a commission that first brought him in 1934, through vacations, visits to friends and family, a book project, magazine work, and a last trip in 1974, he amassed a large but little-known body of work.” Floridas includes Evans’ work selected from five decades, though Samoylova’s contributions here are more numerous. “Both have concerned themselves with the deeper truths that emerge from complex and layered surfaces,” Campany continues. “Both have been mindful of the shifting equation between image and reality that lays [sic] in wait for any photographer wishing to understand Florida.”
Many of us want to understand more about the state and its people, now that its governor, Ron DeSantis, noted for both his cynical approach to Covid prevention and anti-“woke” sentiments, has emerged as a potential presidential candidate. Registered voters of this swing state now include 300,000 more Republicans (5.2M) than Democrats (4.9M) as well as 3.9 million Independents. But even in the 1930s when Evans arrived, Florida’s “disparities of wealth and its cultural patchwork were unavoidable” as he became a “wary but curious chronicler of the widening chasm between ideals and bleak if beautiful fact.” The attitude of his images is frequently “detached and melancholy, beneath which run currents of unease about consumerism and ingrained racial hierarchies.” In 1941, the same year that his well-known pictures of Let Us Know Praise Famous Men established the convention of the free-standing photo essay, Evans was shooting photos in Sarasota.
Samoylova visited the sites of some of Evans’ photos, but not to reshoot those places and objects for before-and-after sensations. Campany believes that the inspiration and affirmation Samoylova finds in Evans is similar to the interest Evans took in Eugene Atget’s work. Where Evans found color photography vulgar, Samoylova queries the Florida palette without relying on it for effect. Campany: “The ambiguity of color is a key to Florida’s psyche, and Samoylova has attuned to it, making photographs that play seduction against itself. What is beautiful in her work is also troubled and deceptive.” In one spread of two 2020 Samoylova shots of structures without humans, the verso features the black and white “Heartbreak Hotel,” while the verso, “Poston Marine,” is a color image. When the two photographers’ images appear side by side, one may compare them for their differences as much as — or for more than – their similarities.
Even so, their differences exist within the more potent if speculative aura of their affinities, resonances and tones. As Campany states, “It is an art of confident and gentle indication, grounded in respect for what an attentive viewer may bring. There are no easy readings, no slick rhetorical tricks, no packaged messages.” In another spread, there is Samoylova’s “Oyster Fishery” in color on the left and Evans’ 1941 black and white “Palm Tree on Beach, Florida” beside it – the first an image of piled shells that hives way to gulls and a whitewashed commercial setting – the other, an image of a tilting, ravaged tree, fronds on the sand beside it, the beach and ocean beyond. The upward-thrusting conveyor in the former speaks in a slant way to the wrecked tree.
When a 12-story beachfront condominium building collapsed in the Miami suburb of Surfside, killing 98 people on June 24, 2021, it was reported that the degradation of reinforced concrete, the penetration of water, and the corrosion of steel – all occurring in the underground parking garage – contributed to the building’s collapse. Both Evans and Samoylova sniff out that telltale, humid moldiness – while peering at what maintains itself as momentarily solid. But they don’t trade on facile contrasting binaries, or only on the glut and shock of Florida’s excessiveness. Floridas doesn’t ask us to look through the corroding architecture, but at it. Similarly, its humans seem simultaneously overtaken by and stubbornly installed within that world.
[Published by Steidl on May 24, 2022, 144 images, 179 pages, $65.00. With an introductory essay by Lauren Groff.]
The photographs of Walker Evans and Anastasia Samoylova appear here with the permission of Steidl. In the order shown above, the photographs are titled and dated as follows:
Anastasia Samoylova, Staircase at King Tide, Hollywood, Florida, 2019
Walker Evans, Trailer in Camp, Florida, 1941. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Anastasia Samoylova, Empty Lots, Mexico Beach, 2021
Anastasia Samoylova, Gun Shop, Port Orange, 2019
Anastasia Samoylova, Blue Chair, 2020
Anastasia Samoylova, Beachgoer, Naples, 2021
For an intriguing dialogue between Anastasia Samoylova and David Campany, click here.
Postscript: After losing his investment in failed property speculation, John Berryman’s father shot himself in Clearwater in 1926.