Floridas
Palmer: the Palm Beach Reader, vol.6, 2024
Floridas: Walker Evans and Anastasia Samoylova
by David Campany
In the mind’s eye or with a camera, Florida is almost too easy to picture. So much about it is unnervingly photo–ready, like it’s all been seen before and primped for the hungry lens. This is probably why so many Florida images simply confirm what the world thinks it wants of it: a tropical paradise, tourist excess, shopping and the good life. Nevertheless, the place is as complex and contradictory any, so how does a serious image maker go beyond the clichés to express something deeper? Walker Evans, a giant of 20th century photography, documented Florida over several decades. Anastasia Samoylova has lived and photographed here since 2016, quickly becoming one of the region’s most celebrated artists. Although generations apart, their sidelong and gently ironic take is a welcome invitation to look again, and think again about what is just below the surface of the sunshine state.
A young and ambitious Walker Evans first visited in Florida in 1934. By then, it was already a winter haven, with a real estate boom and bust that had contributed to the financial crash of 1929. Always counter-intuitive, Evans felt the larger situation might be glimpsed in the smaller details of Florida’s daily life. What he explored prompted him to list his themes:
People all classes, surrounded by bunches of the new down-and-out. Automobiles and 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, bad education, 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.
He seems sardonic here but he was after some critical distance, in the way America’s better artists and novelists always are. Taking the cultural temperature means looking at the overlooked. A hand-painted shop sign might say more than portraits of celebrities or politicians. A common shack or caravan always appealed to him over a slick hotel or new mansion. Between the early 1930s and the early 1970s he returned to Florida often, shooting color and black & white, and on Polaroid film. These visits refreshed his eye and sharpened his sensibility. At times, he even put down his camera to paint in a simple vernacular style.
Anastasia Samoylova’s first response to Florida was a series of sumptuous collages, made by painting over photos she was shooting as source material. When Hurricane Irma struck in 2017, she ventured into the aftermath, taking striking photographs that worked in their own right. The dissonance between an idealised southern Florida and the realities at the forefront of climate change was unsettling, like a mental collage lived daily. It led to her breakout book, FloodZone (2019) an extraordinarily complex and nuanced take on fragile beauty. Meanwhile, Florida was becoming a touchstone for national debates about politics and culture. Samoylova embarked upon countless road trips, covering every corner from the southernmost Keys up to the Forgotten Coast. Through it all, Walker Evans’ acute eye was her chief guide. She even visited the legendary Rybovich family boat works in West Palm Beach, which Evans had photographed for Fortune magazine back in 1961.
Wary of being overly ‘arty’, both these photographers prefer to meet the world head-on and look it in the eye. Their subject matter is usually central in the frame and the edges are a surgical cutting out of a portion of the world. In this way, things can be studied closely until they either offer up their secrets, or deepen their mystery. “Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more,” Evans once said. “Die knowing something. You are not here long.” He and Samoylova rarely chase after anything fleeting. Instead, they move stealthily through places, finding telling vantage points from which to look.
Contemplate something for long enough and it can becomes trangely enigmatic. What does Evans’s photograph of a lion on a torn circus poster mean? Is it a symbol, an allegory, or just a poster? All three, probably. In Orlando, Samoylova noticed a building with a typical mix of styles – Mediterranean, Cuban, Anglo-American. In reality it is the facade of an outdoor mall, an architect’s attempt to conjure up a cultural melting pot in the service of retail and leisure. The ‘Cuba Libre’ café, bottom right, and the 1950s-style Havana belle, top left, are joined by a patchwork of elements in fake-worn yellow, reflected blue sky, and that ever-present Florida pink. She composes her frame to invite scrutiny and a slow unravelling. Look closely and in this one image you will find the rich narrative of Florida’s past and present. In photography all we have is appearance, gossamer thin. The trick is to make appearance hint at the depth of meaning it encodes.
I have written books about Walker Evans, and for a number of years I worked closely with Anastasia Samoylova. It seems so unlikely that the art of someone born in St Louis in 1903 could chime so deeply with the work of one born in the Soviet Union in 1984. Clearly, something about Florida focused their sense of themselves as artists, and as people. We cannot know for sure what it is. I suspect it is to do with the way this place stimulates the eye and the mind in slightly different ways. It can make one truly think about looking, about pictures, about seductive surfaces of the world and what they can tell us. Yes, you can get this anywhere but in Florida it comes at you with almost too much intensity and visual noise. It takes artists of fine visual attention to distil it for us.