A writer who grew up in Orlando now living in London and an artist and photographer born in Moscow now living in Miami discuss what it means to be a Floridian.
Interview by Jonah Goldman Kay | Photographs by Anastasia Samoylova
August 9, 2022
Florida is an amalgamation of many American dreams and their successive failures, layers of branding plastered over a rising shoreline. The state juts out from the coast, a benign growth of Spanish colonialism that atrophied into the United States. Florida contains multitudes, a harbinger of complex political, demographic, and environmental shifts in the rest of the country; or it contains nothing at all, a bizarre oddity whose sole purpose is to provide fodder for clickbait headlines.
In her most recent book, Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova & Walker Evans, photographer Anastasia Samoylova explores the state’s idiosyncratic visual appearance. Samoylova has paired her works, which were taken on a series of road trips across Florida, with photographs taken by Walker Evans on his sojourns to the state between the 1940s and 1970s. The result is a nuanced reflection on the mythology of Florida in American culture and the ways in which the state is visually represented.
Gatorama, 2020
This photograph was taken at Gatorama, an alligator park in Palmdale, Florida. These tourist attractions dot the state’s highways, offering cheap thrills for visitors and an endless supply of alligator heads for purchase in gift shops.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jonah Goldman Kay: You aren’t originally from Florida, right? I’m curious how that experience of moving to the state shaped your outlook of it.
Anastasia Samoylova: I’ve spent six years in Florida, so I’m starting to feel like a Floridian, but I’m also very much from a different situation. I was born in Moscow, and when I moved to the U.S., I lived in Illinois.
I feel like I have this split outsider/insider perspective, which is precious in photography. The lens’ ability to mediate the relationship between subject and photographer lends itself to a kind of separation or distance. There is this kind of neutrality that comes along with being an observer — though, of course, you’re never really neutral.
My background is in architecture, and while I never pursued it professionally, it’s still the primary thread running through all of my projects. I’m deeply interested in space and urban development — how we construct boundaries between natural landscapes and man-made landscapes, and what it looks like when those boundaries are blurred.
Yellow Bedroom, Palm Beach, 2020
JGK: Your works also have a strange relationship to nostalgia, which is a kind of taboo word in photography because it’s often seen as undermining a work by making it overly saccharine. To me, it feels like there are two things that are at odds here: your outsider perspective, which allows you to avoid nostalgia in a way; at the same time, you’re photographing a state whose culture and architecture is suffused with nostalgia.
AS: Florida’s penchant for nostalgia reveals itself almost immediately, doesn't it? If you take somewhere like Venice in Italy, the patina is almost theatrical — nostalgia there is taken to the extreme. What I find most fascinating about Florida, though, is this state of in-betweenness. It almost could fall either way — cities like Miami could become these hyperdeveloped, supercontemporary places. Or the entire place could fall apart. It feels like there's this constant battle of forces pulling it in each direction. That’s what first attracted me to Florida with my first book, FloodZone, and in Floridas, I wanted to explore that even further.
JGK: It's funny that you brought up Venice because I was just there for the Biennale and was staying slightly outside the city. Walking around this Italian suburb, I couldn’t shake this feeling that I was in Florida. It was very visceral — the smell of the foliage brought me back to my childhood in Orlando. And, of course, contemporary Floridian homes often draw heavily on Italianate architecture. But it was also this similar sense of a place that is stuck in between collapse and rapid development.
AS: Both Venice and Miami are quite literally falling into the sea but are continuing to be built up. In both of the books, there are a few images of this Venetian estate called Vizcaya in [Miami neighborhood] Coconut Grove. In Floridas, it’s this long panorama that’s quite flat where you can almost see its past and future spliced together. The result is that you can’t quite understand when in history it is until you see contemporary buildings in the background.
There’s an interesting parallel with Venice here, too. Both places have been built up in a sporadic way. It’s almost like the cities are being patched up as they’re falling apart.
Even though Florida is this hypercondensed, rapidly built-up place, it’s still trying to emulate the Old World aesthetics of somewhere like Venice. You see that most clearly in the color palette. Both places use these pastels — pinks, ochre, a kind of golden yellow, turquoise — and they do it consciously because they’re constantly maintaining it.
A lot of this book … involved many road trips across the state. When I got to these places, many of which I hadn’t seen before, I tried to tune in, be observant, and avoid imposing my own visual expectation of the place.
Bar, Key Largo, 2020
Key Largo is the largest of Florida’s Keys, a chain of islands off the southernmost tip of Florida. While today they’re best known for their kitschy architecture and colorful tourist traps, the Keys have a long history as a destination for artists and writers.
Beauty Shop, Liberty City, Miami, 2019
Liberty City is one of the most culturally rich and financially disinvested areas in Miami. The subjects in this photo face away from the camera — only the woman in the beauty shop advertisement is visible, raising questions of race and representation.
JGK: This interest in the road trip connects you back to Walker Evans, whose work is a big part of your book. Can you tell me a bit about this decision to parallel your works with Evans’ photographs?
AS: I've admired his work forever, as have most photographers. He’s influenced entire generations of photographers. So many things can be extracted from his oeuvre and developed further on formal and conceptual levels. I first got into Evans’ work in Florida with The Mangrove Coast, a book featuring illustrations of the state’s west coast in the 1940s.
Florida, then and now, struggles with its representation and misrepresentation. It's still very much the subject of national jokes, and it's a bit of a scapegoat. I really latched onto this idea that Evans, who’s this monolithic figure in photography, was invested in the state and in the way it was portrayed.
JGK: How did Evans see Florida?
AS: His relationship with Florida is kind of funny and contradictory. For example, he writes that good photography is never “anywhere near a beach,” and yet he has photographed near the beach in Florida.
Pink House, Miami, 2020
In a letter to his friend, Evans wrote this list of how to photograph an American place. This was in the 1930s, when he was staying in Hobe Sound, which is near West Palm Beach. He never mailed that letter, but if you read through it, you can kind of track his relationship to the state, as well as the lineage of photographers who were inspired by him, including me.
He writes:
People, all classes, surrounded by bunches of the new down-and-out.
Automobiles and the automobile landscape.
That’s just so quintessentially American. Would there even be a Stephen Shore without the automobile landscape?
Architecture, American urban taste, commerce, small scale, large scale, the city street atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful stuff, women’s clubs, fake culture …
Fake culture — this is the 1930s! How prophetic was this?
… bad education …
Bad education? Not a day without discussing that one.
… religion in decay. The movies. Evidence of what people of the city read, eat, see for amusement, do for relaxation and not get it. Sex. Advertising.
I actually tried to make a typology of strip and sex clubs across Florida because there are some peculiar specimens there, but none of them ultimately made it into the book.
Flamingo Reflection, 2018
Ripples and debris on the surface of the water distort an otherwise banal photograph of two quintessentially Florida items: palm trees and a flamingo. By inverting and disfiguring these signs of Florida’s tourist-focused image, Samoylova makes visible the environmental damage hidden by the state’s branding.
Venus Mirror, Miami, 2020
Referencing this work, Samoylova wrote: “In [Roman] mythology, Venus was the goddess of love, beauty, and fertility. But this Venus is a mirror in a shop window in Miami’s boutique designer district. She hovers pure but blank, in a refracted fantasy of materialism and leisure.”
JGK: Something I noticed as I was flipping through the book was the way the brightness of the colors masks the poverty that’s behind it. I'm thinking of that photo with a man walking on by a bright red building that has “FLORIDA FURNITURE” written in large yellow letters. And then, almost crammed in the corner, is this sign advertising Section 8 rentals. It’s not that the poverty is hidden — it’s very visible — it’s just overwhelmed by the color.
AS: My goal here wasn’t to be black-and-white or overly didactic, but the story of this building is very telling. It’s this discount furniture shop that served this working-class community for quite some time and is kind of known for its garish McDonald’s color scheme. But now it’s being redeveloped and is going to serve a very different demographic.
Florida Furniture, Miami, 2019
JGK: I feel like that’s kind of paradigmatic of your practice — this documentary impulse that isn’t photojournalistic but is more concerned with the way that people live within these difficult conditions.
AS: There’s this inherent power imbalance in photography. So when I photograph, I try to give my passersby some kind of dignity or, for lack of a better word, beauty. The Florida Furniture store is actually near my house, in a nearby neighborhood. When I was photographing there, I was thinking about where these people are going to go. Because the neighborhood is being redeveloped and no longer accommodates them.
Oftentimes, photojournalism can turn into a kind of aestheticization of poverty, which is something I want to avoid in my work. I want to be a respectful observer documenting the everyday, but without the sensationalization or dramatization that you might see in more journalistic images.
JGK: This darkness underneath the bright colors has a strong connection to the writer Lauren Groff, who wrote a short piece for your book.
AS: I think her work is incredible — this Florida Gothic is so dark, so captivating. It absorbs you like some kind of beautiful swamp that could choke you at any moment. In one of her interviews about her [2018 book “Florida”], Groff said something like “everything wants to kill you” [in Florida]. I can very much relate on my road trips for this book — from nature to the occasional resident.
Car Reflection, Miami Beach, 2018
Samoylova’s interest in geometric shapes is on full display here. More than a visually satisfying photograph, the warped reflection of the stripes on the vehicle prompts a reconsideration of the relationship between the real world and the constructed one.
JGK: Both you and Groff named your books after Florida. There are few states whose name alone connotes so much that you can use it as the title for a book.
AS: There’s a very cohesive idea of Florida, right? It’s this insane clusterfuck of everything happening at once, and it's all extreme. And yet all of that adds up to this incredible natural beauty. Florida is a consequential place that decides a lot for the nation, and its residents have significant political and economic power.
At the same time, the state is kind of going through a crisis of representation. It’s sold itself as this haven for retirees or tourists, but the lived reality is so far from that. There’s also this massive inward migration, coupled with an outward flow of people who can no longer afford to live here. The people who are moving here are often embarrassed to say they live in Florida because of everything the state connotes.
So now there’s this question: Who’s now responsible for building up a narrative for the state? I think photography has a powerful role in creating collective memory, but it can also mythologize. That’s my goal — to think about the way I’m creating a narrative about the state, but also to shape a new idea of what it means to be a Floridian.
Jonah Goldman Kay is a writer and editor who divides his time between London and New Orleans.
Anastasia Samoylova is an American artist who moves between observational photography and studio practice. Her work explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism, and the picturesque. Recently, her work has been featured in exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, Kunst Haus Wien in Austria, HistoryMiami Museum in Florida, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Le Locle, Switzerland. In 2022 Samoylova was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, and her published monographs include Floridas (Steidl, 2022) and FloodZone (Steidl, 2019).
Header Photo: New Condominiums, Bonita Springs, 2021. The condominiums in this city on Florida’s Gulf Coast spring out of a canopy of trees, artificial presences in the Everglades’ untouched landscape. Reminiscent of photographs of rapid development in South Asia, this work presents a utopian vision of living within nature while reminding us of the absurdity of the endeavor.
