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Anastasia Samoylova took a photographic journey up the US east coast – and found herself in America’s unreconciled past just as much as its fragmented present
Trigger finger … Gun Ring, New York, 2024, which features in Atlantic Coast.Thu 27 Nov 2025 08.00 CET
Jesus Saves, Charleston, South Carolina, 2020
In 1954, the American photographer Berenice Abbott set out to document US Route 1, predicting seismic changes to small towns and major cities along the road caused by the rapidly expanding Interstate Highway System. Inspired by Abbott’s acute and poetic observations of life along Route 1, Anastasia Samoylova retraced Abbott’s trip 70 years later, in reverse – beginning in her home state of Florida and ending in Maine. Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast is available from Aperture Books. Text by Aruna D’Souza except where indicated
Woman in Pink Hat, Homestead, Florida, 2025
Samoylova’s photographs explore the enduring impact of Route 1 as a corridor of commerce, migration and myth, revealing how the US landscape continues to be shaped by infrastructure, ideology and illusion
Covered Car, Waycross, Georgia, 2024
Her project, Atlantic Coast,captures a country fragmented by environmental crisis, political nostalgia and unchecked development
Fifth Generation Farmer, Garsburg, North Carolina, 2024
The past bumps up against the present in Atlantic Coast. It is a comment, says Samoylova, on the way the US has never truly reckoned with the original sins of its founding – slavery and genocide above all. So that the past appears, like the return of the repressed, in many images
Gun Ring, New York, 2024
‘This image,’ says Samoylova, ‘was taken at Brooklyn Memorial Day Parade, an event steeped in civic history. What first caught my eye was this woman’s hand resting against a flag-patterned shawl, piled with beaded bracelets and a rhinestone pistol ring. The gesture felt small, yet it opened up a larger conversation about patriotism, personal style and the presence of gun culture in everyday life’
Drying Jeans, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 2024
‘After an astonishing deluge turned parts of Fort Lauderdale into a temporary inland sea,’ says the photographer, ‘I came across this improbable scene: a perfect row of jeans laid out to dry while floodwater still filled the street below. The image feels symbolic, as if ordinary domestic life is being carefully reassembled on top of a shifting and uncertain ground. A small American flag hangs beside the denim, heightening the tension between everyday routine and the reality of a changing climate’
Removal of John C Calhoun Statue, Charleston, South Carolina, 2020
‘What stayed with me here was the contrast between the quiet foreground and the historic shift happening behind it. A Black woman watches the removal of the Calhoun monument while a baby naps on the grass, immediately bringing to mind Robert Frank’s image of a Black nanny holding a white child in The Americans. Here that narrative is inverted: a caretaker witnessing the dismantling of a symbol that once upheld the very hierarchy preserved in Frank’s picture. The photograph holds both history and its unmaking in a single frame’
Princess Tree, Baltimore, Maryland, 2024
‘I liked the contrast between the fragile blossoms and the battered facade,’ says Samoylova. ‘This building was once part of a thriving neighbourhood that Abbott photographed in 1954, when these row houses were still lived in by industrial workers whose jobs have long since disappeared. The princess tree, an invasive species that grows quickly, feels like a metaphor for what remains when industry collapses and investment drains away. The image holds both beauty and neglect, a reminder of how nature fills the void of history.’
Demolition Site, Miami, Florida, 2025
‘This was the collision of two different Miamis: in the foreground, a perfectly coiffed woman scrolling her phone without glancing up; behind her, a building is being torn apart, all twisted metal and falling concrete, watched over by an excavator stamped with “Watch it come down”. The contrast feels almost surreal – luxury and ruin separated by only a few feet. This captures Miami’s uneasy balance: a place where glamour and collapse coexist so closely’
Two Cars, East Harlem, New York, 2024
Samoylova picks out two old cars parked nose to tail, whose colours echo the small-windowed, low-income housing aesthetics of the brick apartment blocks behind. She seems to have been interested in the relentless sameness of American consumer culture she was confronted with on her travels
Historical Re-enactor, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2024
Samoylova doesn’t underline any artificiality here, or give us any way of seeing this as a fiction. There’s no ‘tell’ to suggest this isn’t a historical photograph, other than the title and the technical qualities of the photograph
Fireworks, Fort Knox, Prospect, Maine, 2024
Anastasia Samoylova’s work has been exhibited internationally. It has also featured in many publications and is held in permanent collections throughout the US. Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New YorkExplore more on these topics
