The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York places in dialogue the photographic work of Anastasia Samoylova and that of Walker Evans, which probe the contradictions and complexities of Florida over the course of a century.

The New York institution invites us on a journey through time, to Florida, a popular tourist destination since the early 20th century. Walker Evans (1903-1975), a major figure in documentary and humanist photography, and Anastasia Samoylova (1984-), an American artist and photographer of Russian origin, retrace the imagery of this multi-faceted subtropical paradise. The former, renowned for his portraits of Depression victims, vernacular architecture, domestic interiors and road signs, has captured the emergence of the "Sunshine State" over forty years, from the 1930s onwards. The second, known for her work on environmental and cultural mutations, has been crisscrossing the roads of Florida since 2016, inheriting all that her elder had seen coming.

IMAGES D'ÉPINAL

Palm trees and pink flamingos, real estate billboards and souvenir stands, grand hotels and Gilded Age mansions... It's a whole corpus of images by Walker Evans, rarely shown, that the Met is revealing on the walls of its New York space. Traveling back and forth, the photographer captured the emergence of Florida in every nook and cranny, without ever falling into the conventions of the picturesque guidebook. He was able to interweave cultural influences, multiple heritages, the first waves of tourism and the contrasting beauty of this haven of excess.
This is just a small fraction of the 600 photographs he took, shown as prints. A digital slide show presents " a selection of unframed negatives and color slides from his various visits to Florida between 1934 and 1968 ". Images from Karl Bickel's 1942 book The Mangrove Coast are also on display. Walker Evans spent six weeks touring the "forgotten" West Coast between Sarasota and Tallahassee, immortalizing roadside attractions, street scenes, plant life and architecture, as well as John Ringling's neo-Gothic mansion.

Other archives, acquired by the Met in 1994, are added to the exhibition, including Polaroids, figurative paintings and his famous penny postcards. Walker Evans collected 9,000 of them. From grand hotels (the Breakers in Palm Beach, the Royal Palm in Miami) to the interplay of flora and fauna (orange groves, tropical fruit farms, palm trees, alligators, ostriches, pink flamingos) to boat trips (to Silver Springs, Ocklawaha), they all touted the sunshine state as a vacationer's paradise and marked the rapid growth of tourism. His first photographs, taken at the dawn of the 1930s, foreshadowed his work for the Farm Security Administration across the United States.

FLORIDA ON THE MOVE

Born in Russia, moved to the United States in 2008 and settled in Miami since 2016, Anastasia Samoylova's work focuses on environmental and cultural mutations. She was recently nominated for the Élysée 2025 prize for her Transformations series, inspired by the concept of "climatopies", fighting against the effects of climate change. Here, she photographs Florida's winding roads, from the islands of the Keys to the borders with Alabama and Georgia. This virtuoso plays with mirrors, windows, reflections and refractions. In her collages, she uses acrylic paint to combine photographic realism and pictorial artifice. A case in point is this mirror in the shape of the Venus de Milo, which seems to float among palm trees and storefronts. The shot was taken through a store window in Miami's Design District during Covid-19. " The collage effect, with interior, exterior and reflected space compressed into a single visual plane, creates a dizzying sensation of spatial disorientation ," explain the curators.
The exhibition, taken from the book Floridas (éditions Steidl, 2022), thus highlights the approaches of these two photographers who, in their similarity, sometimes come to confuse each other. Between past and present, black and white and color, they both distort visual clichés in a game of fantasy and reality in the Sunshine State. " Walker Evans chronicles a state booming with tourism and construction, while Samoylova shows it battered by climate change and overbuilding," points out David Campany in his accompanying essay.

All of the images on display highlight both this balancing act and the widening chasm between Florida's ideals and reality, which symbolize the contradictions of today's United States.

" FLORIDAS: ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA AND WALKER EVANS"
THE MET FIFTH AVENUE, GALLERY 852
1000 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK (USA)
UNTIL MAY 11, 2025
METMUSEUM.ORG