Floridas. Photographs by Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans. Published by Steidl.
"I’ve written about Floridas and Floodzone and Samoylova many times this year. I can’t understate how much her work has effected me: I’ve mentioned how it has changed the use of color in my dreams; I’ve talked about how it is a haunting and precise portrait of decay in the American lifestyle; I’ve mentioned its dystopic qualities. Floridas is a glorious book wherein Samylova’s work shines like the daytime sky above us as we swim along underwater. The Evans work is alright, and I am a fan, but next to Samoylova’s wonderful use of color, Evans’ stuff seems like petroglyphs or fossils embedded in stone; this gives the book another quality, in Floridas we get to see what photography can do today, how it has evolved and maybe even get a glimmer of where it might grow to next." — Christopher Johnson
