The Image Cities project by russian-american photographer Anastasia Samoylova was the winning application in the first edition of the biennial KBr Photo Award, launched by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021.
Image Cities is an exhaustive and conscientious work, produced in various locations, on how photography and images are integrated into the urban environment. Samoylova revamps the vision and language of documentary photography in a working process that she defines as artisanal: the photographs are superimposed on one another to create collages in which the human figure is almost always absent and, if it appears at all, it does so on a minimal scale compared to the grandeur of the buildings and advertisements. Her images express the ambivalence and contradictions of today’s urban landscape: while cities try to promote their individuality, their reality is moving towards a generic scenario in which the specific configuration of each city loses its uniqueness amidst anonymous steel and glass architecture.
Curator: Victoria del Val (Fundación MAPFRE).
