Richardson Rambles

Sharing travel experiences with family and friends.

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast

Letitia DeVillar Richardson

February 24, 2026

Photography is having a moment, and one of its rising stars is Miami-based Anastasia Samoylova. Anastasia (b. 1984, Moscow, Russia) first came to our attention several years ago when she appeared as the guest speaker for an event at the Rubell Museum of Miami honoring the Everglades Foundation. While we were impressed with her vision and eloquence, we didn’t feel we knew much about photography and decided to watch her work for a few years and in the meantime learn a bit more about the medium. Fast forward several years, and Anastasia arrived at Art Basel 2025 fresh off a major solo exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (Full disclosure, we bought one of her pieces at Art Basel Miami last December – see photo at the end of this post.)

She is represented in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum, and George Eastman Musuem, the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, The Chrysler Museum of Art, Virginia, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany, as well as in several private collections.

Anastasia produces both observational and studio photography. With the former, she trains her lens on the world around us to present realities visible to the naked eye, if only one knows where and how to look. Her first major collection, FloodZone documented environmental vulnerability in and around Miami, Florida. The images, with which Miamians are sadly familiar, immortalized the sights we see here with frequency: flooded streets and neighborhoods, damage to the built environment stemming from our salt-water and air environs, and flood-displaced persons and wildlife. In Floridas, her Metropolitan exhibit, she recorded our state’s cultural and political diversity, gently but accurately exposing the contradictions and hypocrisies with which we live. In Atlantic Coast, recently on view at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach and documented in a book by the same name, Anastasia retraced the steps of American photographer, Berenice Abbott, who in 1954 traveled historic Route 1 along the North American Atlantic seaboard in order to capture “the face of America”. Our acquisition, Reflection in a Black Thunderbird, was a part of this collection.

Most recently, Anastasia has been revisiting her studio practice, where she enhances photographic images with oil paints to achieve a surrealistic effect. Her American gallery, Dot Fiftyone, showcased these works in an exhibit entitled Now Voyager. The gallery’s website explains that the exhibit displays Samoylova’s “ongoing search for meaning within the shifting image of America”. The acrylic-enhanced photograph “transforms the image into something volatile and alive, a metaphor for both renewal and erasure”.

In both her observational and studio photography, it is important to note that Anastasia does not “stage” the photographs. Rather, she uses her camera to record what she sees and only makes minor adjustments or painted enhancements in the processing and/or studio phases.

More of Anastasia’s work can be seen on her website: https://www.anasamoylova.com/projects. In the meantime, please enjoy some photographs from Now Voyager.