Reminiscing about her early childhood in a small, agricultural town in southern Russia, Anastasia Samoylova can’t help but recall the many striking visuals that shaped the first years of her life: bold propaganda posters, brightly colored ads, and the iconic red-and-gold palette of the Russian Orthodox church.
“I’ve always processed the world through a hyper-visual lens,” Samoylova says. “My brain was always seeking patterns among colors and trying to understand what visuals meant, even well before I could read.”
In adulthood, the rising contemporary artist has built a thriving career in observational photography, drawing on her skill at identifying mesmerizing color schemes in scenes that most would overlook. Like legendary documentary photographers such as Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott, many of Samoylova’s most lauded photographs are the product of road trips—namely, those she’s taken all across Florida, where she’s lived since 2016.
In her captivating and often complex compositions, Samoylova engages with pressing issues such as environmentalism, gentrification, and political fanaticism. In Gatorama (2020), for instance, the artist beautifully captures an alligator bathing in a rusty, abandoned pool against a bubble-gum pink backdrop. Lost Wig (2017) centers the Medusa-like figure of a stranded hairpiece layered over a person’s shadow. And Gun Shop, Port Orange (2019) the viewer’s attention to a mint green Floridian building, its cheerful façade emblazoned with the dark silhouettes of firearms.
Earlier this month, Samoylova became the first living female photographer to headline an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 33 years. Curated by Mia Fineman, “Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans,” on view until May 11, 2025, pairs images from Samoylova’s Floridas series with Florida-themed works by Walker Evans, selected from The Met’s vast archive.
In addition, an extensive survey of Samoylova’s work, “Anastasia Samoylova: Adaptation,” will open at Saatchi Gallery in London on November 5, accompanied by a career-spanning monograph from Thames Hudson. And next year the Miami-based artist will debut a major solo exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.
Needless to say, Samoylova is quickly cementing her position as one of the most intriguing image makers working today—though her path to success has been anything but linear. “The title of my latest book, Adaptation, reflects the many geographic and cultural transitions I’ve experienced throughout my life,” she explains.
The daughter of a Russian literature teacher and a geologist, she came of age in Moscow in the 1990s and early aughts and received her MA in environmental design from the Russian State University for the Humanities. Although at the time, Samoylova found it “utterly impossible” to believe that she could ever sustain herself as an artist, it was at school that she first took an interest in photography. With a camera purchased for her by her mother, she eventually began freelancing as a commercial photographer and worked with agencies and numerous clients in Russia before relocating to the American Midwest to pursue an MFA at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, which she completed in 2011.
After several years as a college professor, primarily teaching the history of photography, Samoylova took a leap of faith and moved to Miami, committing herself entirely to her creative career. “At that point in my life, I realized that things weren’t fully aligning with what I wanted, so I gave myself two years to develop a freelance practice and see where that would take me,” she recalls.
The first observational photographs Samoylova took in Miami evolved into her project FloodZone, an environmentally driven series that considers the city’s volatile weather patterns and the harrowing impact of rising sea levels. This body of work became the centerpiece of her first museum exhibition, at the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa in 2020.
“I had a surplus of images from FloodZone that I began filing under a folder titled ‘Florida,’ and as we were dealing with the consequences of the 2016 election and nearing the 2020 election, I wanted to channel my anxiety through photography,” Samoylova says. That idea would give way to the series now featured at The Met.
Regarding Florida as “a kind of microcosm of America,” teeming with contradictions and peculiarities, the artist headed off on a series of road trips, crisscrossing from Key West to the state’s northernmost borders. Recognizing the similarities between her own practice and that of Evans—whose 1938 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “American Photographs” has been called “the first masterpiece of the road-trip genre”—in 2022 Samoylova published a photography book with Steidl under the title Anastasia Samoylova Walker Evans: Floridas. (This publication preceded the show at The Met, and the images in that book do not entirely reflect what’s on at the museum.)
The novelty of her project as a woman artist was another point of interest. “I love the idea of being a woman on the road,” Samoylova observes. “There are very few of us. Location photography is a completely male-dominated field.”
“When I moved to Miami in 2016, I remember the first institutional show I saw was ‘North and South: Berenice Abbott’s US Route 1’ at The Wolfsonian, and it blew my mind,” she goes on. “Abbott was in her 50s when she did that project. She was struggling financially, and she wasn’t part of this boys’ club where male photographers would write references for each other, drink together, and advocate for each other.”
Summoning Abbott’s pluck, Samoylova didn’t wait for help to find her as she built up her portfolio, instead reaching out directly to editors and curators about showcasing her imagery. “I just decided I would be an advocate for myself,” she says simply. “That meant things like if an initial email was not answered, instead of giving up, I would actually follow up.”
One of her goals was to connect with Met curator Mia Fineman, whom Samoylova emailed before traveling to New York for a fair, hoping to arrange a meeting. “Initially, she didn’t respond, but then I saw her at the fair—I had my Floridas book with me—and thought, What do I have to lose?” Samoylova recalls. “So I decided to follow up. She came to the booth, sat down, and looked through the book very thoroughly and diligently. The rest is history.”
“When I first came across Ana’s work, I was immediately struck by the visual sophistication of her photographs and her acute sensitivity to color as a compositional element,” Fineman tells Vogue. “Her work lies firmly in the tradition of observational photography pioneered by artists like Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, and Lee Friedlander, among others, but her images have a complexity and a political edge that feels very contemporary.”
Building on her admiration for Abbott, Samoylova has continued using road trips as a narrative device, developing a new body of work, titled Atlantic Coast, that aims to retrace the photographer’s journey along Route 1—though in reverse. Samoylova imagines the project both as a tribute to Abbott and an opportunity to examine the enduring import of a major American highway.
Reflecting on this pivotal moment in her career, Samoylova hopes that she can serve as a source of encouragement for other artists struggling to get their careers off the ground. “I mean, we’re not first responders,” she says. “[At times] you question your own delusion and wonder, Who really needs this? But then you realize that you have something to say and that maybe your experience and thoughts will be relatable to somebody. So I hope all of this will be inspiring to others. Honestly, it still feels surreal to me.”