Weather and Climate: Imagining the Future

While disaster photography often relies on images of sudden, spectacular destruction, Anastasia Samoylova deliberately avoids these visual clichés. Her photographic expression instead generates a form of low-level dread. Across her coastal imagery, a crucial distinction emerges between ‘weather,’ referring to immediate phenomena such as storms, rainfall, and flooding, and ‘climate,’ which operates both as a longer environmental condition and as a psychological atmosphere reflecting a collective state of mind.

For instance, Floridas (2016–2021) captures the tense atmosphere of a hyper-politicized era. Within her work, these two threads of weather and psychological climate are constantly intertwined. This prevents us from simply staring at the ruins, moving us instead to imagine a sustainable future amid ecological crisis. She uses seductive, pastel-toned color to picture a landscape in which beauty and denial coexist. The resulting tension slows down our viewing and complicates the seductions of the image. Viewed alongside this project is the landmark FloodZone (2016–2019), which examines the slow, everyday realities of flooding, sea-level rise, speculative development, and climate vulnerability in South Florida and adjacent areas.

The two series expand upon this environmental critique by treating Florida as a microcosm of the nation, utilizing icons like pink flamingos, abandoned architecture, and brightly colored churches to lay out a complex social and political landscape.

Romanticizing the end of the world hinders our imagination of the future. Samoylova demonstrated a clear resistance early in her career through Landscape Sublime (2013 to Present). By printing online stock images of landscapes, sculpting them into studio installations, and re-photographing them, she actively disrupts the generic and standardized views of nature that saturate our screens. The cornerstone of this exhibition, Image Cities (2021–2022), developed across seventeen global metropolises with the support of the inaugural KBr Photo Award. Critiquing the flattening of local cultures, she traveled solo across 17 global metropolises listed by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, including London, Paris, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Madrid. Using a telephoto lens, reflections, and spatial compression, Samoylova brings advertisements, architecture, pedestrians, and local motifs into dense, layered compositions. While her observations expand globally, they resonate deeply in Taiwan today by showing how corporate imagery occupies local spaces. As standardized visuals increasingly dominate our own streets, Samoylova’s work serves as an urgent mirror, inviting us to look deeper, far beyond the comfort of the commercial facade. In light of that, how can we actively and courageously imagine our future world? This is a question for us all to ponder.

Double Vision 

Anastasia Samoylova is an American artist born in Moscow and based between Miami and New York. Her photographic practice critically examines how images shape our understanding of place, environment, and ideology. Her experience across contrasting visual regimes—from post-Soviet Moscow to Miami, where speculative real-estate imagery coexists with climate vulnerability—has sharpened a double perspective that runs throughout her practice: an attraction to the seductions of images alongside a critical awareness of the ideologies they carry. The exhibition opens with her early series Breakfasts, serving as a prologue to her sustained interest in how images circulate through everyday life, domestic space, and consumption. From there, working in dialogue with the documentary traditions of photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans, she examines how the values, ideologies, and visual identities of a place shift over time.

Secondly, her insight consists of a critical psychological distance from mass images. In FloodZone (2016–2019), commercial billboards promising luxury homes and idealized urban landscapes coexist with flooded streets, demolition, construction, and other signs of environmental vulnerability. These seductive images function as a kind of camouflage, projecting an aspirational future onto an unstable present. Samoylova builds layered compositions in camera, compressing signage, reflections, architecture, vegetation, and human traces into a single frame.

This exhibition concludes in Atlantic Coast (2020 to 2025), contrasting idealized national myths of progress and prosperity with the grounded, lived realities of everyday communities. The Climate of Images ultimately invites us to look beyond seductive surfaces and consider how images might help us understand and imagine the world we are collectively creating.