Nothing in Florida is quite what it seems. A popular tourist destination since the early twentieth century, it is a place where fantasy and reality collide, a subtropical paradise threatened by hurricanes and rising sea levels, a refuge for extremism and eccentricity. This exhibition brings together photographs and paintings of Florida by two artists of different generations who have sought to understand its complexity and contradictions: Anastasia Samoylova (born 1984), a Russian-American photographer based in Miami, and Walker Evans (1903–1975), an influential originator of documentary-style American photography.
“Florida is ghastly and very pleasant where I am,” Evans wrote to a friend during his first visit there, in 1934. Over the next forty years, he returned repeatedly, creating a large but little-known body of work depicting the state’s unique natural and cultural landscape: palm trees and pelicans, real estate billboards and souvenir stands, Gilded Age mansions and “tin can” tourist camps. In addition to photographs, the exhibition includes paintings, negatives, and postcards drawn from The Met’s Walker Evans Archive.
Samoylova has been photographing Florida since 2016, crisscrossing the state in a series of meandering road trips, from the southernmost Keys to the state’s borders with Alabama and Georgia. Building on Evans’s legacy, she creates vibrant photographs and mixed-media paintings that temper the shimmering seductions of the Sunshine State with an awareness of the troubling consequences of climate change, gentrification, and political extremism.
