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.