Anastasia Samoylova: FloodZone

Description

Shortlisted for The Photographer's Gallery's Photography Foundation Prize FloodZone is Anastasia Samoylova's photographic account of life on the climatic knife-edge of the southern United States. Serious climate change is upon us, but this is not a visualization of disaster or catastrophe. These beautifully subtle and often unsettling images capture the mood of waiting, of knowing the climate is changing, of living with it. The color palette is tropical: lush greens, azure blues, pastel pinks. But the mood is pensive and melancholy. As new luxury high-rises soar, their foundations are in water. Crumbling walls carry images of tourist paradise. In the heat and humidity nature threatens to return the place to tangled wilderness. Manatees appear in odd places, sensitive to environmental change. Liquid permeates Samoylova's urban scenes and unexpected views: waves, ripples, puddles, pools, splashes and spray. Water is everywhere and water is the problem. Mixing lyric documentary, gently staged photos and epic aerial vistas, FloodZone crosses boundaries to express the deep contradictions of the place. The carefully paced sequence of photographs, arranged as interlocking chapters, make no judgment. They simply show; elegant, sincere, acute and perhaps redemptive. The coast of the southern United States looks and feels like a paradise, but all is not what it seems. As sea levels rise and hurricanes threaten, the beauty of the place becomes bittersweet. The future is uncertain but life goes on. FloodZone is a book about living with the contradiction. Anastasia Samoylova

Born in Moscow in 1984, Anastasia Samoylova moves between observational photography, studio practice and installation. She has exhibited at the Aperture Foundation, New York; the Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston; and at festivals in Brazil, Belgium, France, Holland, China, South Korea and Germany. Samoylova has published her work in Smithsonian Magazine, FOAM, Art Press, Monocle and Bloomberg Businessweek.

The photographs do work as dreamily precise near-abstract images and yet at the same time answer anthropological questions about how we live, what we desire and fear, how manipulable we are.--Michael Hoffman "Baffler" A series reflecting and responding to the problem of rising sea levels, ... [FloodZone] subverts the visual language of paradise to reflect today's environmental anxieties.-- "Aesthetica" 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--Monica Uszerowicz "New York Review of Books" Samoylova has taken today's Miami as her subject, and made a smartly layered visual portrait of the city, highlighting the seeds of coming climate peril that hide in plain view.--Loring Knoblauch "Collector Daily" These photos explore how rising sea levels are affecting Miami.--Kenneth Dickerman "Washington Post" Ana has taken a unique approach to the subject of climate change and rising sea levels. Much of the imagery around these themes is imbued with tragedy and drama, and is as hard-hitting as it is thought-provoking. Ana's images, though, are subtle and understated, a different perspective on the subject.--Alex Kahl "WePresent" Anastasia Samoylova photographs boarded-up buildings, flooded pools and bright advertising hoarding, exploring how the city continues to expand, even as the foundations sink.--Hudson Brown "Gobe" Anastasia Samoylova's photobook FloodZone captures the insidious progression of climate change in Florida's southeastern city.--Hannah Abel-Hirsch "British Journal of Photography" FloodZone constitutes an inventive addition to the slew of recent approximate visions of the Anthropocene. Samoylova's is a fantastic double vision, proffering depictions that oscillate somewhere between the already seen and never seen.--Tim Clark "1000 Words" In FloodZone...Samoylova peels back the layers of fantasy to reveal the impending horror that lies at our doorstep. Lush, beautiful and seductive, Samoylova's photographs ... are subversive images of paradise, glossy and sleek, subtly revealing something hellish lurking just beneath the surface.--Sara Rosen "Document Journal" In FloodZone, the new book...Samoylova peels back the layers of fantasy to reveal the impending horror that lies at our doorstep. Lush, beautiful and seductive, Samoylova's photographs ... are subversive images of paradise, glossy and sleek, subtly revealing something hellish lurking just beneath the surface... when it's too late to go back but we haven't quite realized what we have lost.--Sara Rosen "Document Journal" Photographed in and around Miami, Anastasia Samoylova's latest book, "FloodZone, is an urgent and brooding reflection on the rising sea levels rapidly submerging the city and its environs.--Gregory Jones "Lensculture" Samoylova tracks the slow, insidious creep of the climate crisis that cities like Miami ignore at their peril.--Jean Dykstra "Photograph" Turbulence comes out of nowhere. You can picture what follows, and many photographers do, but you will find no images of catastrophe in Anastasia Samoylova's "FloodZone." She is looking for other things, the subtler signs of what awaits the populations that cluster along shorelines. What is it to live day by day on a climatic knife's edge?--David Campany "New Yorker"