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David Furst: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm David Furst, in for Alison Stewart. We're joined now by the first living woman photographer to headline a show at the Met since 1991. Anastasia Samoylova is a Russian-American artist who moved to the United States in 2008. In 2016, she found her way to Florida, where she began capturing life in one of the country's most unique states. Her series, FloodZone, focused on the effects of climate change in the state. In her latest Florida project, Anastasia focuses her lens on a changing and divisive Florida. From capturing our fractured political moment to documenting gentrification.

Anastasia's work is not photojournalism or pure documentary. It's artful, colorful, often surreal. She's also able to create a collage-like feel with a single photo. Her work in Florida is the focus of the new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Florida's Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans. The show pairs Anastasia's work with Walker Evans' early 20th-century photographs of Florida. Anastasia also has a brand new monograph of her workout. That book is called Adaptation. Anastasia Samoylova, welcome to All Of It.

Anastasia Samoylova: Thank you so much, David. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

David Furst: It's great to have you with us, and listeners, if you'd like to see an example of some of Anastasia's work as we have this conversation, you could head to our Instagram. That's allofitwnyc. Anastasia, when was the first time, if you can cast your mind back, the first time you remember picking up a camera?

Anastasia Samoylova: I remember it very distinctly. It was a Zenith camera. It was a film camera. I grew up in Russia, so this was Russian manufacturing, and it was faulty. That wasn't unusual, and it was driving me crazy. Because of that, I think I took a picture. It was a still life of one of my stuffed toys.

David Furst: Of course.

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes. I already noticed that the focus wasn't quite there. Even at the age of seven, I believe, I saw the shortcomings of that camera, and I was dreaming of something better.

David Furst: Dreaming of ways you could improve the situation.

Anastasia Samoylova: Or of digital technology.

David Furst: I know you have a degree in architecture and environmental studies. How did you bring that background into your work as an artist and photographer?

Anastasia Samoylova: Photography had very practical use for me initially. As part of that program in environmental design, we had to build models of spaces by hand, so everything was designed physical space. These were paper models, and then we had to photograph them for critiques. Initially, I was quite confused as to how to approach these models. Then once I got a hang of it, I got quite seduced by photography and its ability to transform your sense of space and scale and proportion. Of course, light was such an incredible tool, even on that miniature scale. I embraced photography fully, and I realized that I prefer images to the actual models and potential spaces.

David Furst: That's interesting how photography pulled you out of the model and into that different direction. Now, let's talk about Florida. When did you first move to Florida, and what were your first impressions?

Anastasia Samoylova: I moved to Florida in 2016, and prior to that, I visited it as a tourist as part of one of those packed cruises. It was my first and last cruise.

David Furst: I see.

Anastasia Samoylova: It was a quick visit to Miami Beach.

David Furst: Miami Beach is where you're based now, right?

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, correct. Yes. I'm much further away from the location of that initial visit, which was South Beach. I'm in North Beach now with normal people, with residents, versus tourists, and so the transient crowds. It's a very different feeling. The initial impression was that of, again, this typical tourist paradise. All the marshmallow colors of the art deco district, incessant shopping, all of the bikinis, all the sculpted bodies and palm trees. The usual palette that you would associate with Florida.

David Furst: Right, that tourist impression of Florida.

Anastasia Samoylova: Exactly.

David Furst: Now, there's a lot of focus on water and flooding in your work, and climate change. How did you weather, first of all, the most recent storms in the state?

Anastasia Samoylova: Just to give you an example, last week I had to book myself four different flights in hopes that one of them will make it out here because I was involved in the installation at the Met. Having to cancel those flights as you try to make it, all of this is part of that climate anxiety. Of course, I can't really complain because being on the East Coast and the West Coast got hit so much harder and people have lost homes. It's always relative.

David Furst: Always relative. I'm going back to that initial impression that you had as a tourist, and now you've been living there for some time, but you've described yourself as a kind of insider-outsider. How do you think that gives you a unique perspective when you're capturing Florida as a photographer?

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, I think that detachment, once you embrace this outsiderness, this outsider status, it's a blessing for a photographer. In a place like Miami, it is so easy to blend in with a crowd of other picture-takers.

David Furst: Oh, everybody's got a camera.

Anastasia Samoylova: Absolutely. Taking pictures of themselves, of each other, of the landscape. It was an easy transition for me, coming from studio practice into documentary photography, and I owe it to Miami.

David Furst: You owe it to Miami. Now, I realize the answer to this one could be a long one, but what makes Florida such a unique state?

Anastasia Samoylova: Oh, may I ask you, what do you associate with Florida? If these were just keywords, what would you throw in there?

David Furst: There's a lot of shorthand joking that goes on. Like, oh, some crazy story is Florida man. Then there's the tourists' impressions of Florida. Then there's the divisive politics of Florida. There's the climate change aspect of Florida. There's so many different Floridas.

Anastasia Samoylova: Absolutely. This is the mythology that's very strong and I would say is accurate. You just painted the picture of Florida. What makes it unique? There's actually a great book about it, one of my favorites. It's called Oh, Florida by Craig Pittman, and he explains why so many things in Florida become transparent and become national and international news so quickly. There's very specific factors as to why. It's very easy for it to become a subject of jokes. It's a bit of a scapegoat in the nation, from all the memes visualizing cutting off Florida, the peninsula.

David Furst: Oh, the Bugs Bunny clip of. Yes. Cutting it off from the map. Yes.

Anastasia Samoylova: Exactly.

David Furst: Not very helpful.

Anastasia Samoylova: It's quite eccentric. Yes. It's expressive. It's out there. It's on the surface, but that's only one side of it.

David Furst: There's this constant battle that you-- looking through your book, again, let me mention the name of it, Adaptation. A great collection of your work. Really fascinating. If you want to follow along, we have images up. Oh, I forget exactly where to find them, but on our Instagram, just go to allofitwnyc. The images are fascinating, and you should check out the images as we're talking about it, because there's this constant battle that I feel looking through the book between flooding and cleanup, decay and upkeep, and between the advertising image of Florida and life in the communities that you capture in your work.

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, absolutely. Even having visited it for such a brief time, just a couple of days, I already had this preconceived idea of what Florida was supposed to look like. The first project that you mentioned, my FloodZone project, came out of really just daily walks in an effort to understand the place, to just process this very new climate for myself. I grew up in a Nordic climate, and then I lived in the American Midwest for seven years. This was absolutely new, being in subtropical climate, it took quite a bit of adaptation. If there's one keyword that defines my life, I think that's the one.

David Furst: Adaptation.

Anastasia Samoylova: Absolutely. Then the first year moved here, moved there in 2016, first hurricane hit us. It was only category three. It was minor, and we just had a party with the neighbors, but the next year was the critical one, that was Irma, that was coming as category four, and it caused quite a bit of damage in Miami. This is the scale of it. The sublime nature. It feels like it can take over any minute. Again, speaking of scale and proportion, you feel very small as a human being, and all those buildings appear incredibly fragile.

David Furst: Structures that you looked at the day before as some permanent thing, you see the next day as very fragile.

Anastasia Samoylova: Absolutely. When you see those balconies getting ripped off and potentially flying. Yes.

David Furst: We're speaking with photographer Anastasia Samoylova. Her work is on view right now in the Met exhibit, Floridas Anastasia Samoyleva and Walker Evans, and that new monograph of her work is also available, that is called Adaptation. You're the first living woman photographer to headline an exhibit at the Met since the 1990s. What does that mean to you?

Anastasia Samoylova: It's quite overwhelming. It's an enormous honor. I try to go to the show every day and be a ghost, which is my preferred way of being as a photographer as well, and as an observer of our people--

David Furst: We should know that if we're walking around at the show, you might be in the room somewhere.

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, indeed. That has happened a couple times. I was only recognized once, and then the other day I recognized one of the viewers who's also an incredible photographer. I love watching what people respond to. Of course, it's an important feedback for me because I'm constantly working on a new project. I'm shooting right now and just what people point out, and I love when people get very close to the work. This show is a bit of a pandora's box. It lures you in with very tropical color palette. There are no white walls in the show. I'd like to keep a bit of an intrigue, but then the climax builds up as you explore the exhibition, and it gets more and more provocative in a way.

David Furst: Let's talk about the pairing in this show. In this Met exhibit, your work is paired with the work of Walker Evans. What was your first exposure to his photography?

Anastasia Samoylova: I used to teach photography. Straight out of my second graduate school of my MFA here in Midwest, I got a job teaching photography. I wasn't really skilled to teach history of photography, but there was nobody else to do it, so I had to really dive into it and study it thoroughly. Evans quickly emerged as my key figure. Just his approach to his subjects, his, in a way, artlessness. It's all about the subject. There's very little, so to speak, photographic shtick. It's quite modest in its visual approach, and it's quite reduced in its tools, but it really becomes all about the subject.

There's slight irony there. He's political, but it's not immediately in your face. He addresses many layers that I find important and urgent, but he does it in a way where it doesn't feel like a didactic narrative or a photojournalistic sensationalist approach. It's lyric documentary is what he called it.

David Furst: Has his work informed the way you approach photography, especially in Florida?

Anastasia Samoylova: Absolutely. Nothing is made in vacuum. He's one of many figures for me, so is Robert Rauschenberg, for instance, and you'll see traces of him there. AThen painter Natalia Goncharova, which you wouldn't immediately think of when entering the exhibition. I have another project called Breakfast With art and photo books, so I'm still a student. Very much so. I have my own visual language at this point, but there are all these inspirations that come together for, I think, for any artist.

David Furst: You mentioned how he weaves politics, a political view, subtly into his work. You have said, I listened to one conversation with you where you said, "It's never just art, it's always more than that." What does that mean for you, and what are you striving for when we're thinking about that in your art?

Anastasia Samoylova: Absolutely. This phrase referred to my choice of the medium. The transition to documentary or straight observational photography was certainly a push outside of my comfort zone as an artist. I was always a studio artist working with photography. I would build tableaus and rephotograph them, make collages, but then in Florida specifically, it felt urgent to document my experience as this insider seeing the signs of heating climate and beyond, and how it's all intertwined with economic divide, with political decisions, with very much our everyday life, how climate change is not this separate issue, and you can only illustrate it with polar bears on those sinking ice caps.

That creates this distance between us and climate change, but we are very much living in it right now. Of course, we all know. So how do you convey that message? I believe that I was doing that through picturing details of everyday life that point towards it. Of course, it's not just climate. There are several layers in the show, both in mine and Evans's work, that point to the bigger picture.

David Furst: Now, there's a lot of beautiful color in your work, as you say. In addition to all of those issues that you're getting at, there's these pinks and blues. A lot of these colors pop out. What role do you think color plays in your work?

Anastasia Samoylova: Beauty has become a bit of a taboo word in art, oddly. Color is a powerful tool, and so is beauty. The kind of beauty that I employ as an artist and as a photographer is of a dark kind. I look at these images, and I see the picturesque of a subverted postcard. The composition is quite classical, and again, I don't want to give it away, but postcards in the picturesque is a prominent thread throughout the show, and so is the vernacular, for instance. Then you realize that there's a darker side to that beauty.

David Furst: We'll see some images of yours that have these gigantic corporate billboards standing above this community that has a very different feel to what we see in the billboard.

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, absolutely. Oftentimes, in the cracks of the billboard, you will see crumbling facades and flooded foundations. It's this idea of a construct and of a facade versus reality.

David Furst: A covering up also of the reality, as some of these billboards are really right in front of hiding things.

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, precisely. This kind of veil.

David Furst: Your work captures a lot of gentrification and development that is happening across Florida. How have you seen things change in Florida since you moved there in 2016?

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, even in this eight years, I've seen it transform. It feels like the cost of living has doubled, and we're losing a lot of amazing people. It's a problem. There has been an inward migration. I think Florida, I don't want to misquote, is one of the top three states for inward migration.

David Furst: Meaning moving away from--

Anastasia Samoylova: People are moving into Florida.

David Furst: Oh, I see. Yes.

Anastasia Samoylova: Especially in the last four years since COVID. It's predominantly the wealthy.

David Furst: Is it hard to capture that change in a single photograph? How do you tell that story?

Anastasia Samoylova: That's why my images are so layered. Often people confuse them with collages, but actually, throughout the show, you won't see any photoshopped images. I do color correction and then tonal correction, but all of these are straight images. By layering, visually layering through. Usually, I use a longer lens. I don't want to go into full nerd mode, but--

David Furst: Let's go it, full nerd mode here, and you can check to see the images that you're talking about. There's a great example if you go to Instagram at allofitwnyc. The one I'm thinking about, you can describe it better than me, but I think it's shot through a store window looking to an exterior. I absolutely thought it was a collage when I saw this image, but it's the way you framed it and some of the reflections in the window that it's just a photograph.

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes. You must be referring to the Venus Mirror.

David Furst: Yes.

Anastasia Samoylova: It's this female torso-shaped mirror that was standing in a glass vitrine of a shop in the Design District in Miami. Then I love that it was reflecting this brightly lit wall with a security camera on it. That area has transformed radically in the last eight years. To me, again, I like to keep the meaning of my images quite open. There are some that you won't mistake for anything else, like an upside-down flag, for instance.

David Furst: There are some that you won't mistake. Of course, Florida is a state that has a lot going on politically. One photo in the Met exhibit features a man with a confederate flag tattoo and gun tattoos on his stomach. Another features a graffiti portrait of Donald Trump. What are some of the things that you're considering when taking a photo that deals with politics in some way?

Anastasia Samoylova: Again, it really helps being a ghost in this, because otherwise, I probably won't get access to some of the subjects. I have to approach people specifically when it's people with a very open mind, and it's really just about-- it becomes really just about the picture for me. It happened, and I don't pose anybody. Most of the time when people appear in my images, it's when they asked me to photograph them, because I'm mainly after architecture and places, but I cooperate every time.

Then the images that you're referring to are the more explicitly political ones. Needless to say, the 2016 election was extraordinarily triggering for me, coming from Russia, where there's some overlap in the rhetoric, for example, extending the term, the presidential term from four to six years, which has been implemented right there, and so there's no going back. The project is based on a lot of research, but it's also very personal. Part of it came out of an impulse just to get in the car, my first car, and drive off and just channel some of that anxiety. I can't believe that that candidate is still relevant in this election.

David Furst: Get out there and channel what you're feeling in some way.

Anastasia Samoylova: Precisely.

David Furst: Do you consider yourself a Floridian at this point?

Anastasia Samoylova: I'm a bit of a nomad, and there's a lot to love about Florida. It's a bit of a love-hate relationship.

David Furst: That's probably the way people think about a lot of places, though.

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, I keep hearing that. Now I'm working on a bigger project called the Atlantic Coast, and I'm afraid to report that you can find Florida anywhere.

David Furst: You can find Florida everywhere, so open your eyes now. I have to mention this. We've been talking about some of the politics here, but there's also can't be a collection of Florida images without a few gators thrown into the mix. You have some very striking images in your work, including one of what looks like a huge gator. You can describe this better than me, that wound up in someone's pool, perhaps after flooding.

Anastasia Samoylova: That's the beauty of photography. It will keep you guessing. My captions are very minimal, because they do. Those gators do end up in people's pools, and then they would drag people's dogs into the water and so forth. This one is a more controlled environment. This was part of a tourist attraction, an old tourist attraction of Route 27 called Gatorama. Gator is sitting there being raised for meat and leather.

David Furst: Oh, Gatorama. I thought you were going to mention Gatorland Zoo, which is my other Florida Gator attraction I think of. I like the fact that you don't have a whole long list of explanation with a lot of the images. In fact, you confront us with a confusing image right on the cover of your book. Anastasia Samoylova Adaptation, there's a photo. It looks like it's a collage of some painting and some photography. There's a palm tree with shadow and what-- I'm not sure what this is on the ground. You really have to look closely at it and try to imagine what this could be. It could be that there was a big paint spill, and this is the mark of a paint can after a paint spill. It's not clear.

Anastasia Samoylova: I love that you're spending time in that, and that's very deliberate on my behalf. I want to keep the images not only open, but also layered enough to inspire a slower pace of visual consumption. We are surrounded by images on a daily basis. Everything is an image now.

David Furst: We all take a million photos every day.

Anastasia Samoylova: Exactly. It's an overload. Then they're consumed at such a rapid pace that it feels like they no longer make sense. It's just an ocean of images. It's very challenging. I spend a lot of time thinking about images and how to slow down that pace of interpretation and visual consumption.

David Furst: It's really essential because you can take any book like this of photography and do a quick flip through and go, "Okay, that looks pretty interesting." It's only when you slow down and talk about what you see in the room, when you see people slow down and get close to the work and start thinking about-- try to sort out some of these things that it really comes alive.

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, absolutely. The work is quite poetic. It's dark, and there's that beauty and color. There's this allure of the surface in these images, but then there's this darker underside and, yes, I think of it as poetic.

David Furst: As we're wrapping up, I know you've done a lot of work on Florida. Is there any other state you'd be interested in capturing? Can we convince you to take some photos of New York while you're here?

Anastasia Samoylova: Absolutely, and I have. It was published in my book Image Cities last year. Currently, I'm working on the project, Revisiting Berenice Abbott's Route 1, and so I'm shooting all the states along the East Coast.

David Furst: All the states along the East Coast. Okay, so you're going to be busy.

Anastasia Samoylova: Yes, and I'm working on a weekly basis again. Next week, I'll be shooting in New Jersey.

David Furst: Fantastic. All right, I'll see you there. The new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is called Florida's Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans. You also have a new collection of your photography out. We've been talking about it called Adaptation. Anastasia Samoylova, thank you. Excuse me. I said your name right. Until then, Anastasia Samoylova, thank you for speaking with us today.

Anastasia Samoylova: Thank you so much for having me. It was a thrill. Thank you.

David Furst: Congratulations on the show.

Anastasia Samoylova: Thank you.