FloodZone.

Photographs by Anastasia Samoylova. Text by David Campany.

Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2020. English, 136 pp., 86 illustrations, 9x10¾".

Winner of the KBr Photo Award de Fundación MAPFRE.

FloodZone is Miami-based Russian photographer Anastasia Samoylova’s (born 1984) account of life on the knife-edge of the Southern United States: in Florida, where sea levels are rising and hurricanes threaten. But this book is not a visualization of disaster or catastrophe. These beautifully subtle and often unsettling images capture the mood of waiting, of knowing the climate is changing, of living with it. The color palette is tropical: lush greens, azure blues, pastel pinks. But the mood is pensive and melancholy. As new luxury high-rises soar, their foundations are in water. Crumbling walls carry images of tourist paradise. Manatees appear in odd places, sensitive to environmental change. Water is everywhere and water is the problem. Mixing lyric documentary, gently staged photos and epic aerial vistas, FloodZone crosses boundaries to express the deep contradictions of the place. The carefully paced sequence of photographs, arranged as interlocking chapters, make no judgment: they simply show.

"I keep coming back to this word in the works of Anastasia Samoylova; Ballardian. Ballardian means, most of all, a living dystopia of science, environmental destruction, elephantine wealth and immeasurable disparity careening toward a certain and often violent end. Floodzone is that exactly; a pictorial dictionary entry for the concept.

"Samoylova’s work is the last outpost between Florida as an eye of storm, Florida as a serene vacation spot on the mouth of an abyss and Florida as a sunken realm, like the long-ago submerged subcontinent Zealandia. The color palate is one of humidity, Cuban inspired pastel pinks and the mysterious darkness that shallow water can have when sheathing pavement; an almost suffocating profusion of growth and everyone carefree in shorts, shirtless or sporting a bikini top. There is both the looming danger and the ignorance of carrying on day-to-day while striving for that Ethereum dream of digitally secure safety, as if one could dig and find that digital wealth in the earth like a rich vein of 1s and 0s in shock green against a black screen of dirt.

"This sounds, perhaps, garish — it isn’t; it’s wonderous." — Christopher Johnson, photo-eye Bookstore

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