Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans,
Metropolitan Museum, New York,
October 14, 2024–May 11, 2025.
Before Florida was a state, it was a state of mind. When still remote, it shimmered with the allure of an earthly paradise. Later, thanks to the highways and prosperity that sprang up in America after World War Two, people who had only dreamed of the place could now see it for themselves. The population grew with a vigor that shows no signs of abating. A winter resort for the privileged became a popular family destination, and tract homes and condo towers mushroomed on the wetlands.
In 2016, Anastasia Samoylova, a photographer who was born in Russia, moved to Miami, where she still lives. Florida is more than her locale. She has made it the subject of her complex pictures, which typically juxtapose textured, transparent, or reflective surfaces. Like the history of the state, they are layered. In them, you can discern the palm-fringed fantasies, the saturated tropical colors, the political rancor, the waters rising from climate change, the tawdriness of mall culture, the fervor over firearms, and all the other forces that form the Florida of today.
“Floridas,” an exhibition organized by curator Mia Fineman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, paired her pictures with those of Walker Evans, her distinguished predecessor. (The show is a spin-off of an earlier book with the same title.) For over forty years, until 1974, a year before his death, Evans repeatedly visited the state. Along with an attraction to vernacular signs and quirky shops, the two artists share a flair for rigorous formal compositions that underscore the wackiness of what they are photographing.
A knowledge of Evans’s work is one of the overlays in Samoylova’s Florida. Although most of her work is in color, she has taken many black-and-white pictures that reiterate Evans’s subject matter and frontal compositions. Riffing on a photo Evans made of his shadow falling on parched ground, with the outline of his head darkening a plywood board that bears the sign “Fresh Water,” Samoylova shot her own shadow cast on scrubland, with a discarded wig that sits where her head should be. It is a picture about making use of what has been left behind.
As Evans himself knew, the myth of Florida was largely manufactured by images. He wryly made that point when, in 1941, he depicted a professional photographer, equipped with artificial pelicans, palm trees, and a stuffed alligator, as she bends over her tripod-supported camera to photograph a primly dressed tourist.
These days, the image of Florida as a tropical sanctuary vies with reports of floods and storms. Samoylova is drawn to water: the rivers and lakes that carry rippling reflections, the damp air that puckers painted walls and rusts the chassis of cars. In one of her photographs, a hurricane-ravaged coastal stretch of Mexico Beach on the Panhandle has been denuded of its houses, except for one sturdy survivor. In another, an abandoned building of weathered plywood and cinder-block on the Miami River has been so bleached by sun and moisture to monochrome grays that even its reflection in the wavy-patterned water is gray. But through a crack in a door and against a sliver of sky, as well as in the liquid mirror image, you can discern the green of vegetation—a reminder of the subtropical flora (and a tip-off that this is not a black-and-white photograph).
Willem de Kooning once remarked that oil paint was created so that artists could depict flesh. Confronted with Samoylova’s photographs of Florida, you might say that color film was invented to capture the voluptuous beauty of the tropics. Her black-and-white images, striking as they are, seem colder than her color prints. And simpler. Although they document peculiar sights, you know what you are seeing, even if you might wonder why it is there. An upside-down house, complete with palm tree and utility pole, rests atop a building in Orlando. A crude replica of Mount Rushmore sits on a lawn. A gazebo is so overgrown with vegetation that it appears to be dissolving. A gigantic statue (the third tallest in the United States) depicts Pegasus conquering a dragon. As impeccably composed and rendered as they are, the pictures might be taken to be photojournalism. These are straightforward shots of off-kilter subjects. But Samoylova occasionally resorts to black-and-white film to portray scenes of pure lyricism. Her shot of a silhouetted vulture landing on misty shimmering water is a Whistler-like nocturne in grays and blacks.
When photography first emerged, it was recognized both as an art form and a recording tool. Much time elapsed before photographers were considered to be the equals of painters. Indeed, they may have yet to achieve that status. But under the influence of modernism, the capabilities of photography specific to the medium were celebrated, and artists using a camera endeavored to depict the world through the impressions left on film. That constraint sparked their creativity.
Although Evans never doubted or deprecated his chosen medium, he dabbled in painting, and some of his Florida landscapes are included in the exhibition and book. They are charming. Like his photographs, Evans’s paintings pare down the subject matter—water, shacks, fences and palm trees—to their essentials. But the effect is different when he moves from photography to painting. What was magisterial becomes childlike.
Samoylova has also been trying her hand at painting, to embellish some of her photographs with acrylic brushwork. Instead of enhancing the images, however, the decorative additions dilute them. In our postmodern world, with categories and boundaries breaking down, there is a trend among younger photographers to supplement their pictures with gewgaws: ostentatious frames, unusual fabrics used in place of printing papers, partial coverings on the prints like the metal shield on an icon. Compared to those self-indulgences, overpainting is a less eccentric and obtrusive add-on.
But for Samoylova, it is unnecessary. A straight photograph like Pointe Mall, Orlando, taken in 2020, holds your attention and delights your eye with visual drama. In a kind of alchemy, she has transmuted a shopping mall into a richly colored tapestry. The image is segmented. At the bottom, a yellow awning hangs next to another one that is striped blue, with the edge of a sign filling out the frame. Above are two different facades, one off-white, one pink, with Moorish arches. Through the openings of the pink one, you can see a wrought-iron balcony and blue water. To the left stands a vertically divided tableau of palms and sky, and above it a striking mural of a Latina with a pink hibiscus in her hair, sitting at a bar.
The flattened space is disorienting. Without the help of perspective, you can’t be sure what is a head-on view, a reflection, or a representation. Mixing the natural and the artificial, the real and the fantastic, the image tantalizes. The woman’s knowing look sticks in your mind. Is she issuing an invitation or a warning? Or maybe both? In Samoylova’s worldview, opposites can co-exist without mutual cancellation. Florida is a wealth of contradictions, and her ravishing photographs transmit a mixed signal.
Arthur Lubow is the author of the biographies Diane Arbus and Man Ray. He writes regularly about photography for the New York Times.