About the Author

Born in Moscow in 1984, Anastasia Samoylova moves between observational photography and studio practice. Recent exhibitions include those at Kunst Haus Wien, Kunsthalle Mannheim, USF Contemporary Art Museum, the Orlando Museum of Art, The Print Center and the Chrysler Museum of Art. Her work is held in the Wilhelm Hack Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among other collections. Steidl published Samoylova's FloodZone in 2019.

Walker Evans (1903-75) is an acknowledged master of photography whose diverse body of work continues to shape our understanding of the modern era. Evans began photographing in the 1920s, moving quickly to define his aesthetic and subject matter: straight and sober images of American everyday life and its environs. Within a decade he had produced some of the most significant photographs of the twentieth century, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and published two landmark books: American Photographs (1938) and Let us now Praise Famous Men with James Agee (1941). Evans wrote art and film reviews for Time (1943-45), was employed by Fortune between 1945 and '65 and taught at Yale thereafter. Steidl has published Lyric Documentary (2006), Walker Evans: the magazine work (2014) and Double Elephant (2015).

Reviews

In her travels across the state, she has captured Florida's idiosyncrasies in a variety of modes: some of the photographs are compact and succinct, others are multi-layered and obscure. Some are vaguely romantic. The final effect is much like Florida, complicated and hard to define.--Elisabeth Biondi "Photograph"

The two photographers share an appreciation for the collage-like incongruities the state seems to offer in abundance, for the degree of artifice that produces them and the pictorial flatness they generate. But where Evans was chronicling a Florida on the verge of expansion from tourism and construction, Samoylova shows us a state already battered by climate change, not to mention overbuilding.--Lucy Sante "The New York Times Book Review"

Through Floridas, Samoylova captures the Florida that Evans witnessed the unequivocal originations of. Weaving the past and the-- "Flaunt"

Weaving black and white with color photographs filled with layers and light, the sequence can often seem dreamlike, but the two versions of Florida documented in?Floridas?are very real.--Jeff Campagna "Smithsonian"

It's not call and echo, it's a conversation...it's a great photographer's reverence before her great predecessor.--Michael Hoffman "Baffler"