Citizen of Everywhere: Photographer Anastasia Samoylova on Finding Her Place in the Strangest State in America
If you'd stumbled into a conversation with Anastasia Samoylova without knowing anything about her, you might assume she was a writer. She talks in long, beautiful arcs — about Florida Gothic and Walker Evans, about cults and idealism, about her grandmother going to protests in Soviet Russia and what it means to photograph a place that owes its entire identity to images of itself. Then you'd find out she's one of the most exciting photographers working today, and it would all make perfect sense.
We sat down with Anastasia - who goes by Ana - from her studio on Normandy Island, a little off-the-radar pocket of Miami Beach she describes as "normal people Miami Beach." It's the kind of detail that tells you a lot about her.
Watch our interview with Ana in it’s entirety.
From Moscow to Miami, via Middle-of-Nowhere Illinois
Ana came to the United States in January 2008, not to New York or Los Angeles but to a small Midwestern town to do her MFA at a university that specialized, she laughs, in engineering and heavy machinery. She'd already studied environmental design in Moscow and had been working since she was 16 - as an event photographer, a shop window decorator, a person who figured things out.
The MFA path wasn't glamorous, but it gave her something valuable: a way into America that most people never get. She taught undergrad students who were nurses, welders, veterans, hunters. First-generation college students. "You get to know the country from that perspective," she says, and she means it without a trace of condescension. It's shaped everything about how she sees America and her place in it.
Early tenure at a community college. Then a tenure-track position at Bard. Then, because she got a New Yorker feature while standing at a podium in small-town Illinois, and because the art world started paying attention, and because she was burning out, a two-year residency in Miami Beach with a free studio and a chance to start over.
That's how she ended up in Florida. And Florida, it turns out, was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Everythingism
Ana is reluctant to call herself a photographer, and it's not false modesty. Her work spans books, exhibitions, film, installation. She talks about her favorite artist, Natalia Goncharova, the early 20th century Russian painter who coined the term "everythingism" during the age of isms, because she refused to be pinned to any single movement. Ana clearly feels a kinship there.
If there's a thread running through all her work, she says, it's places. The psychology of them. How they shape us and how we shape them back. It makes sense for someone who has had to adapt so many times - Russia to Illinois to Massachusetts to Miami - always arriving somewhere new and learning to read it.
Her photographs are formal and painterly, with a compositional boldness that traces back to the Russian avant-garde. But they're also deeply observational, patient, almost deadpan. She calls the approach "lyric documentary" - borrowing the term from Walker Evans, which turns out to be very much on purpose.
Florida, Walker Evans, and the Met
Her 2022 book, Flood Zone, was four intensive years of photographing Florida's landscapes against a backdrop of climate anxiety and environmental politics. It was published by Steidl, a genuine legend in photography publishing, and came about the way a lot of Ana's best opportunities have: she just asked.
"You just ask and then you'll see," she says, "while having absolutely no expectations that somebody will say yes." She flew to Göttingen, sat on the same couch Nan Goldin had just vacated, shook the entire time, and got the book made.
But it was her next Florida project that became something even bigger. While already deep into photographing the state for what would become Florida's (published with Steidl alongside author Lauren Groff, who contributed an original short story), Ana fell down a research rabbit hole and discovered Walker Evans's Florida archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Evans had spent four decades, from the 1930s through the 70s, returning to Florida in a love-hate relationship with the place. Some of his Florida negatives had never been reproduced in print.
Ana put her images next to his. Not as homage, but as genuine conversation, two photographers, separated by decades, seeing the same strange and contradictory place with remarkably similar eyes. In some spreads, it's not immediately obvious who shot what.
This past year, that project became a show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Gilman Gallery, with the Met acquiring her work for their permanent collection. It's the kind of sentence that takes a moment to land. She was 39. She'd had 90 exhibitions by that point, nearly half institutional, a quarter solo. She'd done it largely without the conventional art-world runway, without the New York base, often without the ability to travel freely during the first years of her son's life.
"I'm definitely gonna need a cocktail on the opening day," she said when we spoke. We hope she had a good one.
Florida as a Mirror
Ana's relationship with Florida is complicated in the most productive way. She finds it both absurd and fascinating, deeply political and unexpectedly revealing. "Florida owes its existence to images of itself," she says - tourist postcards, real estate brochures, the gap between projected fantasy and lived reality. That gap is where her work lives.
After the 2020 election, she started driving. Just getting in the car with music blasting, processing her feelings by moving through the landscape, trying to understand where Trump's voters were coming from. "It opened my eyes to certain things," she says, "just how insular certain communities are." She picked up Lauren Groff's short story collection Florida on that road trip, and says it restored her ability to think creatively rather than just panic.
Her theory is that Florida is a stand-in for the whole nation - New York plus Alabama equals Florida, California plus Texas, equals Florida, amplified and expressed openly. The Florida man jokes, the kitsch, the extremity of it. For someone who grew up watching her grandmother believe in something political enough to protest for it, and then watched that world collapse, Florida's particular brand of manufactured reality hits differently.
She doesn't tell you what to think about any of it. That's deliberate. "I'm very averse to propaganda," she says. "If somebody tells me what to think, I need some distance." The photographs bring you in through color and form and that lyric documentary eye, and then they ask you to sit with something a little uncomfortable.
The Throughline
What strikes you most talking to Anna is that she's built this career the same way she describes photographing - with patience, formal rigor, and a willingness to put herself next to things that seem out of reach and see what happens. The New Yorker. Steidl. Walker Evans. The Met. Lauren Groff. Each one started with an email or a social media comment or a PDF proposal and the simple logic of: why not ask?
"As a woman in the arts," she says, "it's almost like there's no winning anyway. So I'm just going to dare."
Her survey book Adaptation (Thames & Hudson) is out now, gathering 17 years of projects into one place. Shows just closed at Saatchi Gallery in London and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida. She's just turned 40, and got to vote in her first-ever presidential election as an American, and is still describing herself as an outsider - which, if you look at the body of work she's built from that position, seems less like a disadvantage and more like the whole point.
Watch our interview with Ana’s in it’s entirety. Follow her on Instagram. Go look at the work. Then look at it again.