Anastasia Samoylova’s Decaying America

On the cover of her book, Anastasia Samoylova chose the polished hood of a black Thunderbird reflecting palm trees. The image, taken in Palm Beach in 2024, opens Atlantic Coast with a promise of travel. But already something is wrong: too bright, too perfect, this mirroring body captures less of the landscape than it devours it. Behind the symbol of gleaming America emerges a mirage.

How better to grasp the essence of a country so fractured? “How to see America—in all its vast, messy contradictions, in a way that makes an argument, even a partial one—for what it is without smoothing over the simultaneous glory and pain,” asks critic Aruna D’Souza in her opening essay. For Anastasia Samoylova, the gesture involves mapping “not just the space but the place, the sum of geography and politics and culture and economy and power and history.”

Though the photographer settled in Miami in 2016, Florida, the journey’s starting point, embodies more than a place of residence. “A condition” more than a state. “Beginning in Florida meant starting from a place of acceleration, excess, and climate precarity, a landscape already under strain,” she explains. Moving north, in reverse of Berenice Abbott’s direction, allowed her to move “against the current of the American myth, away from endless expansion and toward accumulation, memory, and sediment.”

Route 1, from Abbott to Samoylova

The artist positions herself both within and against the approach of the great documentarians of the American road trip. Before her, Berenice Abbott photographed Route 1 in 1954, sensing “the country’s impending transformation,” notes Lauren Richman, curator of the exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art. The following year, Robert Frank traversed the United States behind the wheel of a Ford Business Coupe, with his sharp Swiss gaze.

Samoylova inherits this double tradition: the foreign eye—she emigrated from Russia at twenty-three—and the road as revealer of national identity. But where Berenice Abbott feared cultural “leveling” caused by the Interstate Highway System, Anastasia Samoylova tracks “disconcerting nostalgia,” according to Lauren Richman. This way America has of clinging to an idealized past to better flee its present.

In Waycross, Georgia, she photographs a car covered with a tarp in front of a dilapidated house. The scene echoes the one Abbott captured seventy years earlier in the same spot. “Despite the peeling paint and nature’s encroachment on the building in the background, her camera also records a moment of care: the protective covering of a vehicle,” the curator notes. Like a bandage on gangrene.

Working digitally, Samoylova first systematically photographs everything in color, reserving the choice of final treatment for editing. “The decision to remain in color or move into black and white happens later and is guided by narrative and emotional clarity rather than instinct alone,” she confides. Color is never neutral: it reveals or stifles.

“When color amplifies meaning, atmosphere, or tension, I keep it and often heighten it. When color becomes a distraction or flattens the image into mere description, I remove it,” Anastasia Samoylova continues. Black and white allows certain images “to breathe differently, to lean into structure, gesture, or history.” This choice is less about style than narrative necessity.

Flags, Guns, and Bombers

American symbols proliferate, often menacing. A stained-glass window in a church in Pooler, Georgia, shows three bombers roaring above a vengeful Christ. War invites itself into places of worship, sanctified by sacred imagery. “I feel the same unease when I see a close-up of a woman’s hand resting on her shawl woven with the American flag pattern,” confesses Aruna D’Souza.

“Her wrist bears friendship bead bracelets, and her index finger a rhinestone ring in the shape of a gun,” the critic continues. This image, Gun Ring, New York, New York, condenses the project’s vertigo: “This is the America I fear—the one unable to let go of the idealization of war, whether past wars or an imagined war of internal enemies.”

Anastasia Samoylova observes what she calls “the broader Floridification of the nation.” The concept of “Florida everywhere,” already explored in FloodZone (2019) and Floridas (2022), finds its continental extension here. This gun ring, photographed in New York and not Florida, pulverizes geographic stereotypes. Danger is everywhere, including in reputedly progressive states.

Samoylova’s method for taking the country’s pulse oscillates between immersion and withdrawal. “The boundary between participation and observation is fluid and situational,” she explains. Sometimes the artist approaches people directly, engages in conversation, explains her project. Other times she photographs from a distance, “allowing individuals to inhabit public space on their own terms.”

She is interested in “how people perform identity, often unconsciously, through posture, clothing, objects, and gesture.” Even without intervention, “the act of being seen is already a form of collaboration,” she emphasizes. The portraits “reflect this tension between agency and exposure.” Performance begins as soon as one knows oneself watched.

Ruins and Poisonous Beauty

Decay marks the journey. In Jacksonville, Florida, a tabby structure—this colonial concrete made of crushed shells—raises its blackened chimneys. Remnants of an 18th-century slave era, these ruins remind us that “this country has never truly confronted the original sins of its founding—slavery and genocide above all,” Aruna D’Souza hammers home.

The past resurfaces everywhere, “like the return of the repressed,” in Samoylova’s lens. In Charleston, South Carolina, she documents the removal of the statue of John C. Calhoun, vice president from 1825 to 1832 and ardent defender of slavery. Toppled in June 2020 after the George Floyd protests, the statue had stood in Marion Square since 1896. History refuses to disappear, haunts each image.

Some stun with their poisonous beauty. A woman with her back turned, in Miami, poses in a blood-red form-fitting dress, cinched at the waist. The scene unfolds during a street party, music blaring, crowd packed. “The color here is sublime, equal parts paradise and hell: the crimson of her garment, the indigo of the shadows framing her silhouette,” describes Aruna D’Souza.

“The orange-yellows, the blue-greens glimpsed further away, and over her shoulder, the deep blackness of the revelers’ silhouettes; her afro resembles a halo,” the critic continues. This image, like that of another smiling Black woman in Darien, Georgia, wearing a sweater appliquéd with a ukiyo-e print, offers an escape. Two portraits of dignity, of presence claimed in American public space.

“If so many images in Atlantic Coast make me painfully aware of the America I live in, these few crucial ones offer a vision of what America could be,” concludes Aruna D’Souza. An America celebrating individuality, difference, Black joy. In these portraits, the photographed women assert their presence, refuse to be erased.

Kitsch and Relics

Temporality wavers. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a historical reenactor in 1940s attire—pin curls, flowered apron, and white collar—stands behind the counter of an old-fashioned candy store. Vintage candy jars, chrome cash register, retro advertising posters—each detail meticulously recreates the era.

Only the title and technical qualities of the photograph betray the imposture. The digital sharpness, the saturated colors of a modern sensor contradict the analog universe the scene evokes. This performativity of the past, which Lauren Richman compares to the danger of Putin’s nostalgic propaganda, runs through the book as a warning. Time becomes a decoy, a seductive trap.

Vintage automobiles line the route: a blue Oldsmobile sits enthroned in a garage in Brunswick, Georgia, polished like a national treasure despite the surrounding decay. An antediluvian pickup truck with a massive pig aboard in Old Lyme, Connecticut. A hearse for sale near Orient, Maine, displays a “For Sale by Owner” sign, transforming this funeral vehicle into an ordinary consumer good.

“Abbott feared that the turn toward American consumer conformism would eliminate all sense of cultural distinction between states,” Richman recalls. Anastasia Samoylova hunts these worn American relics not out of nostalgia but for “their singularity.” Americana saturates the landscape, like eagles, fringed jackets, and Elvis souvenirs in guitar shops.

“What draws me to vintage cars and Americana is not nostalgia,” she assures. “These objects (…) are often obsessively maintained, imbued with personal meaning, and staged within everyday life.” Kitsch interests Anastasia Samoylova only as a symptom of a nation bent on a fantasized past.

Americana then becomes revelatory of a deeper malaise, “between aspiration and reality.” The final image imposes a deliberate withdrawal from these stratagems. A firework crackles behind a hotel window. On the windowsill, a glass of water and an apple: intimate traces of a solitary presence facing the collective spectacle. “Ending the book with fireworks seen from inside a hotel room was a deliberate shift in perspective,” explains Anastasia Samoylova.

“Throughout the project I am embedded in public space, moving through roads, towns, and landscapes. The final image introduces distance, glass, and reflection,” she specifies. The luminous bursts explode above the Penobscot River, but the glass separates them from the observer. “Curiously, the detachment makes the image more intimate. You feel like you’re in the room with Samoylova,” notes Lauren Richman.

Beyond the feeling of proximity with the faces encountered on the road, this distancing by the artist infuses and reveals the consciousness of decline. It infuses everywhere. In this photo of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, this twisted wire hanger bearing the inscription “Affordable Healthcare” in Miami, this pair of jeans hung to dry in a flooded yard in Fort Lauderdale.

These traces of infrastructural and social decay punctuate this narrative of a crumbling America. Witness these visions of twisted steel, soaked paper, so many hopes suspended on rusted nails. “We live in a state of collapse,” Aruna D’Souza declares. This urgency permeates the gaze of Anastasia Samoylova, a naturalized immigrant since 2018, observing with perplexity a country torn between its promises and its reality.

Atlantic Coast appears on the approach of the 250th anniversary of the United States, a moment when the country scrutinizes its own reflection. Anastasia Samoylova’s Route 1 reveals a nation between proclaimed glory and visible decay. She takes the viewer on a road trip as captivating as it is uncomfortable, between renewed fascination and profound unease.

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coastis published by Aperture and the Norton Museum of Art and is available at aperture.org