Large cities that lose their individuality, despite looking for it, contradictory urban environments, inhabitants who are indifferent and spaces full of superimposed elements in an impressive way. This is the language mastered by Anastasia Samoylova, the Russian-American photographer who won the first edition of Fundación MAPFRE's KBr Photo Award with Image Cities, the exhibition that can be seen until May 14 at the KBr gallery in Barcelona.
Samoylova, a graduate in Fine Arts from Bradley University (USA) and a Master's in Environmental Design from the Russian State University for the Humanities, began this project in Moscow and New York in 2021, to study the integration of photography and image in the urban environment. Thanks to this award, the artist was able to complete the project in other cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, London, Brussels, Tokyo, Madrid or Barcelona.
The Image Cities exhibition tour unfolds over fifty photographs selected from more than two hundred images. The sense as a series is born precisely from the disappearance of the individuality of the city based on the seriality revealed between the images of the different metropolises. The men and women who appear in some of Samoylova's photographs walk indifferently through the streets of this global city, self-absorbed, in front of banners and billboards dedicated to new luxury housing developments, or to advertisements for technology, jewelry, perfumes or fashion.
In this sequence of collages of bright colors and sharp contours, reflections or compositions in succession of planes, the monumentality of the buildings stands out from any other motif that appears in the image. The last group of photographs in the show is dedicated to the image of women in the city. The female figure is the center of the consumer society, of an advertisement that links existence to luxury and glamour, and that has little to do with everyday concerns.
Concepts such as the non-city and practices such as collage are some of the keys to Samoylova's style, evident in Image Cities. In today's age, international economic and cultural centers are becoming more alike, even as cities like New York, Moscow, or London try to promote their individuality. Despite this intent, all these cities are moving towards a generic urban landscape of unified architecture made of steel and glass, in which homes, offices and shops are practically the same.
Samoylova's project closely analyzes the role that photography plays in revealing this ideological gap between an urban identity that wants to be claimed and the homogeneous reality that its images show. In addition, since her first works, one of Samoylova's main concerns has been the composition of her images, perfectly studied and with superimposed elements, a fundamental practice to obtain the results she seeks. In Image Cities, collage continues to be an obvious resource.
In Samoylova's work, echoes of the documentary tradition photography approached by figures such as Eugène Atget at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as Berenice Abbot or Lisette Model, resonate. The games of reflections or the compositions based on sectioned elements are reminiscent of the work of Lee Friedlander, one of the artists most revered by Samoylova and a key figure in the renewal of documentary photography along with fellow Americans Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand at the end of the the sixties of the last century.
"His photography provides a renewed language and vision within documentary practice, incorporating vibrant images of urban landscapes in a contradictory world, in keeping with a current situation marked by a major crisis, not only economic, but also climatic and even sociocultural," they describe. from Fundación MAPFRE. “My goal is to dismantle stereotypes,” Samoylova said recently, admitting that she came later to photography after her training in environmental design and painting, even drawing on her experience in other fields.
“I worked as a window dresser while I was studying at the university. It is not something that I usually tell, but I also think it was important to me, ”she confessed. For her, "photography is a very solitary, meditative experience," she pointed out during her participation in Paris Photo 2019. The artist is like a contemporary flâneur —like the stroller of the French writer Charles Baudelaire— who walks through the 21st century city showing her less recognizable side and questioning the role of the image, and especially the use it makes of the figure of women in global society.
Samoylova's originality has also surfaced through other photographic projects with great international repercussions. From an unusual perspective, the artist documented the consequences of sea level rise in South Florida, challenging the way we think about climate change, and created colorful cubist compositions using royalty-free images and integrating nature, architecture and the city. With Image Cities, the artist once again questions our way of seeing the reality that surrounds us with a new look, as critical as it is aesthetic.
