Adaptation

 By Anastasia Samoylova

Thames and Hudson, 2024

In October, the Russian-born America-residing photographer Anastasia Samoylova will be exhibiting at the Metropolitan Museum in New York her contemporary photographs of Florida alongside much earlier photographs of the state by Walker Evans.  This exhibit will be the apogee—for now—of Samoylova’s rapid ascent in the world of art photography. Just 40, Samoylova has already released three substantial photobooks, two with Steidl, the pre-eminent publisher of such volumes.  One of those is entitled Floridas, the basis of the Met show.  To celebrate the exhibit and her career, Thames and Hudson—another eminent press--is publishing Adaptation, which includes images from earlier books and her other projects.

Adaptation also includes substantial essays by the photography critic David Campany, the cultural historian Lucy (formerly Luc) Sante, and the Met curator Mia Fineman.  With its 195 illustrations and 223 10 by 12 pages, Adaptation is a heavy book, in literal weight and in its writers’ references to earlier photographers, postmodern theorists, and current politics.  The writers’ density is wholly appropriate, for Samoylova is a history-minded and studious artist who leans into—and sometimes on—forerunners such as Evans.  By “studious,” I mean to imply Samoylova is both learned and does a lot of studio work, primarily collages, some done in three dimensions, others resembling AI combinations, some using images that are partly painted over.

All are then photographed by—further adapted by — Samoylova.  One of these studio projects is called “Breakfasts” in which Samoylova appropriates an image by a famous photographer, places various kinds of food on the image, and then photographs the collage of art and nature.

“Breakfasts” reminded me of Levi-Strauss’ famous formulation the raw and the cooked.  I found the studio images overcooked.  Perhaps necessarily included for the comprehensive ambition of Adaptation, these pages will be, I fear, of interest only to photography professors and image professionals—and may distract other readers from Samoylova’s best and important works.  The three essayists don’t make qualitative judgments about the different kinds of works included in Adaptation, but I will.  I think Samoylova’s strength is the raw or, more precisely, the “rare”: documentary images that are artful in their composition but not high-art signaling as her studio work is.  These “rare” images appear in the section of Adaptation that gives homage to Evans, but the images from FloodZone and Image Cities better demonstrate both Samoylova’s independence from her adaptable forerunners and her critical worldliness that I admire.

Of these two earlier books, Image Cities is the more project-driven and thus narrower. Samoylova received a grant to travel to global metropolises and to take photographs of the mostly gigantic images that cover exterior walls with advertisements for transnational products.  Against these backgrounds, she shoots individuals dwarfed by the images, many of which feature women.  The following image is one of the most explicitly feminist photographs in Image Cities:

The woman in white seems trapped in the doubled red world between the foreground fence and the background dark.  She appears to be trying to understand her situation.  In other photographs, women and a few men walk past huge hoardings, seemingly oblivious, but Samoylova knows—from her youth in Russia and years in Miami—what blllboard propaganda, whether political or commercial, can do to the people surrounded by it.  Although the point of Image Cities is blunt, Samoylova’s clever framing techniques make the photographs both pedagogic and pleasurable.

Quite a few of the photographs in Image Cities were taken in Russia, but there are sixteen other cities that furnish images.  In many, Samoylova uses reflections to create studio-like collages, now of the urban real and unreal.  As with the photograph above, almost all are color saturated.  At one time, Samoylova worked as a window dresser.  Now her works undress the fake facades.

Some of the same techniques Samoylova uses in Image Cities were present in the earlier FloodZone, particularly the contrast between billboards and actual life, but FloodZone is a more varied and affecting work, an extraordinary combination of the raw and what I’m calling the rare.  In 2016, Samoylova moved from the Midwest to Miami, just in time for the 2017 hurricane and flooding.  She wasn’t roaming the world looking to fill out an idea.  Raw nature found her, and she left her studio, went out, got her feet wet, and took photos.  The resulting serendipity of the street photographer gives FloodZone its visual and emotional richness.  A flood scrambles all, and the flood of images in FloodZone represents that chaos, long shots and closeups of high water, humans and fish jumbled together, substantial buildings and jerry-built structures losing their foundations.  The artist taking these shots does not call attention to herself as an artist as she did when making the studio photographs.

Image Cities decries the global glut of images.  FloodZone uses selective images to decry the effects of global warming.  Image Cities is influenced by Frankfurt School theory.  FloodZone adapts the Bible, Noah’s high water and Revelations future apocalypse.  Publications were unfortunately allowed to reprint only a few, not very representative photographs from FloodZone.  The following image does represent the power of nature when it exists only as decoration for civilization.

Having viewed and re-viewed FloodZone multiple times, I’m rather disappointed in the images included from it in Adaptation.  They often seem selected to demonstrate the continuity of the cooked in Samoylova’s career.  David Campany edited FloodZone and Floridas, and he is identified as the editor of Adaptation.  Campany is also the author of the “Foreword” and the concluding essay, where he calls Samoylova’s art one of “display and presentation” (his italics).  I don’t think those words apply to FloodZone, which I found as deeply empathetic as its water.  With this new book, I worry that Samoylova may be too much influenced by yet another authority, not another photographer or even a cultural theorist but a critic/editor/collaborator who seems invested in the most complicated—the most cooked—of her photographs.  In her next project, I’d like to see Samoylova reassert her freedom to combine the raw and the rare.  Yes, as Image Cities “argues,” the physical world is covered over by too many images in the service of money and power, but that world can also be recovered through images.  Not from adaptation but from transparency or its illusion.   From a barely heard voice saying, “Yes, yes, I was there.”  To which the viewer murmurs—as Wim Wenders imagines in his Landscapes, Photographs.—“Oh, so all of that exists!”

This is the fourth photobook review by the literary critic and novelist Tom LeClair.