Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “Florida Man Arrested After Throwing Spaghetti Sauce at His Mom.” “Florida Man Wrangles Alligator With Bare Feet.” “Florida Man Shoplifts Chainsaw by Sticking It Down his Pants.” Such headlines represent a popular genre of news coverage that chronicles the outlandish, often illegal exploits of the proverbial “Florida man”. Americans have long delighted in the vast number of bizarre stories emerging from the Sunshine State. But for Anastasia Samoylova, this schadenfreude masks a deeper truth. “Florida is a stand-in for the nation,” she says. The 40-year-old Russian-born artist, based in Miami since 2016, has experienced a whirlwind rise to prominence largely thanks to her surreal, disorienting photographs of the state. From December 6-8, several of these works will be presented at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair by Berlin gallery Wentrup. They simultaneously appear in a larger survey of Samoylova’s art at Saatchi Gallery in London and are featured prominently in her new monograph, Adaptation, published by Thames & Hudson. Most significantly, dozens of images of her adopted home are on view in Floridas, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that juxtaposes Samoylova’s work with that of Walker Evans, the legendary mid-century American photographer who returned to the state repeatedly over 40 years.In a 1934 letter to a friend, Evans described Florida as “ghastly” and “very pleasant” in the same sentence. Samoylova captures this seeming contradiction in photographs ranging from a close-up of an alligator happily splashing in the runoff of a water pipe to a shot of a sun-dappled mint-green building with silhouettes of AR-15 assault rifles on the exterior. Through Samoylova’s eyes, we see not only Florida, but also America, as a place where seductive, shiny surfaces are overshadowed by an ever-present spectre of violence. When we meet at the Met, Samoylova seems as surprised as anyone that her debut New York solo show is at the city’s most august art institution. She is the first living female photographer to anchor an exhibition since Helen Levitt in 1991. “With this show, everything is a series of miracles,” says Samoylova, dressed in black leather slacks, a white button-down, and an oversize blazer, looking every inch the in-demand contemporary artist. But she is practised at blending in to any environment. “If there’s one key word about my whole life, it’s adaptation,” she says. Through her eyes, we see not only Florida, but also America, as a place where seductive, shiny surfaces are overshadowed by an ever-present spectre of violenceOn road trips for work, she sports a very different uniform: camouflage trousers. She bought her first pair at a gas station after deciding her jeans were too uncomfortable to drive in. “Somehow that got me access to so many places that otherwise would’ve been a lot more closed off,” she says, giving the example of the Hurricane Michael-ravaged coastline of Mexico Beach, Florida, as it was being scoped out by a group of opportunistic developers in 2021. But even in the right attire, shoots don’t always go according to plan. Once, a man let his guard dogs outside to intimidate her; she has frequently been asked, sometimes threateningly, if she works for a news organisation. “There were moments where I could easily have been dead,” she says. Like Florida itself, Samoylova’s life is a study in contrasts. At five, she and her family moved from rural southern Russia to Moscow. After graduating from college with a degree in environmental design (art felt too impractical), she secured a teaching gig in Peoria, Illinois. Although she had steadily worked as a photographer since her teens (she did event photography for spending money and later taught fine-art studio photography), she did not pursue it as a full-time artistic practice until she moved to Miami for a residency in 2016. The tropical climate, not to mention the existential threat posed by hurricanes, represented a sharp change in backdrop from the Midwest.Before moving south, Samoylova had been working largely in collage. But in Miami, “I felt like I didn’t have to assemble anything. It was already a collage,” she says. She began capturing street scenes — hand-painted signs, architectural pastiche, storm-felled palm trees. “Anastasia is able to take the genre of observational photography and push it in a new direction,” says Met curator Mia Fineman, who organised the Floridas show. She first encountered Samoylova’s work on Instagram; they emailed back and forth before Samoylova spotted Fineman at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers fair in New York in 2022. She chased her down to share a newly released photo book juxtaposing her own work with Evans’s. On the spot, the curator said she wanted it to become the basis for a show.Key to Samoylova’s aesthetic is the use of a telephoto lens. Her technique compresses the depth of field, flattening traditional perspective and “creating a sense of confusion and disorientation,” explains Fineman. This discombobulated aesthetic reflects Samoylova’s experience as a Russian immigrant thrust into American culture as well as the more universal flattening that is endemic to consuming images on the internet. She intentionally keeps the titles of her work straightforward and descriptive (“Roadside Gun Shop, Port Orange”, “Rusted Car”). “It’s a very deliberate act not to make it didactic,” she says. “That’s because where I come from, everything is didactic — the meaning of anything is prescribed for you.”Over the past four years, Samoylova has been travelling up and down the East Coast for a new series inspired by the American photographer Berenice Abbott’s “U.S. Route 1” — images documenting an epic road trip from Florida to Maine, which Abbott set out on in 1954. Samoylova is taking a similar route to depict a changing America from her perspective. So far, her subjects include the youngest person in Congress (US Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida, who is 27) and the removal of a Confederate statue in Charleston, South Carolina. “Florida is actually everywhere,” says Samoylova of her travels. This assertion may be correct in more ways than one. On election night, Florida — once considered a swing state but increasingly a Republican stronghold — was among the first to be called for President Donald Trump. The prevalence of “Florida man” stories, meanwhile, is likely due in part to robust freedom of information laws that make it easier and faster for journalists there to access police reports. That means that what is happening in Florida could well be happening everywhere else in America, at least to some degree. For Samoylova, the sooner the rest of the country realises that, the better prepared for the future it will be. Anastasia Samoylova at WENTRUP, Booth C24, at Art Basel Miami Beach, December 6 – 8, 2024; ‘Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to May 11 2025
