Lecture in Photography: Anastasia Samoylova

About The Event

Watch the video: https://vimeo.com/411430881

Read the transcript: https://www.mocp.org/education/resources/anastasia-samoylova-transcript-1.pdf

Anastasia Samoylova moves between observational photography, studio practice and installation. Although her work takes many forms, a central concern is the place images occupy in our understanding and misunderstanding of the world. The epic project FloodZone, photographed in the Southern United States, reworks our expectations of coastal paradise into a psychological portrait of communities faced with rising sea levels. Noting how the corporate imagery of tourism and the real estate boom mask the realities of a land in crisis, Samoylova developed a way of photographing that carefully opens up the dissonance. She pushes the lush color palette and seductive iconography of the region until it becomes its own critique. With over 80 photographs, the book of the project was published by Steidl in 2019.

Another of her series, Landscape Sublime, explores how social-media images and the repetition of certain motifs inform  an  understanding  of  natural  phenomena.  In  recent  years  the  project  has  been  frequently  commissioned  as  large-scale  public  art  installations  and shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions. 

Anastasia Samoylova completed her MA in Environmental Design from Russian State University of Humanities (2007), and MFA from Bradley University, Peoria, IL (2011). She has been included in many exhibitions, nationally and internationally, including at the Aperture Foundation, New York, NY (2016); the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA (2015); and the Contemporary Arts Center, Peoria, IL (2013), among many others.

Lectures in Photography are co-presented by MoCP and the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago.