Not even twenty years have passed since Susan Sontag wrote her eye-opening volume “Regarding the Pain of Others”. Here she asserts that a photograph must be shocking in order to really surprise us, and at the same time she raises doubts on how long an image can actually retain its uncanny effect on the human mind. That is, would we get used to the raw, unfiltered images of tragedy? How long does the pain provoked by these images last? The answer lies in the book itself, and in our everyday life as well. Our unconcerned gaze at dramatic and disturbing images of tragedies, perceived as infinitely far away from us, is a bewildering matter of fact.
Our indifference today is stronger than ever. When we are on social media, photographs reporting news from around the world randomly alternates with exciting advertisements promoting the latest e-shop website or professional training programs at unmissable discounts, and – if we are lucky – frivolous snapshots of our high school classmates making light of their dog by dressing it up in a suit of dubious taste. In this context, we can easily skip tragedy, as we know her face.
FloodZone by Russian-American artist Anastasia Samoylova, now on show at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Florida, until May 29, 2022, is positioned among those photographic projects that are able to question the effectiveness of the way in which catastrophes and tragedies – or more generally, important socio-political-environmental issues – are traditionally represented by the media. We think we know the face of tragedy, but Samoylova makes us change our mind. We are not always able to recognize the appearance of pain, especially when it is close to us, as it’s hard to distinguish its contours.
In her photographs, Samoylova documents the aftermath of climate change along South Florida’s shoreline that, due to the rising sea levels, are receding relentlessly. Her images direct attention to the visible signs of the disquiet and the lack of preparation for this environmental emergency, thus creating an alternative storytelling of what it means to live in a sinking ecosystem. Through a deceptive aesthetic, Samoylova blurs the lines between light and shadow, paradise and hell. In these multi-layered views everything seems to sparkle; the colors are bright and the details are super sharp. Pink, green and blue nuances catch the eye with their elegance and delicacy… We’re looking at something beautiful, or are we? Behind these picturesque trompe-l’oeils, nestle the cracks of an unbalanced connection between the political and economical interests and the impact that they have on Miami’s infrastructure in the everyday life of its residents. A luxury lifestyle is advertised on the giant billboards that wrap the buildings under construction, rendering a sumptuous and trendy semblance. The traces of the sea-level rise are visible only to a careful eye, such as the one of Samoylova: with her camera she frames the coastal wildlife, flooded construction sites and rusted architecture in Miami.
Born in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, Samoylova moved to Miami Beach in 2016. Here she discovered the clash between a dreamlike, idealized representation of the city and its reality, that, in her eyes, is akin to Russia’s discrepancy between the regime utopia and the harshness it cleverly conceals. Her personal background is definitely important in order to understand the sensitivity she has in challenging the role of photography in regards to the collective memory — especially when it comes to visual imagery. Moving between observational photography, studio practice and installation, she dismantles the fragments that make up the complexity of photographic language, namely the lens through which we know and shape the world and ourselves. Be it about an environmental issue, a political dissonance or a reflection on the construction of imaginaries, looking at Samoylova’s disruptive images in the light of Sontag’s prophetic warning, one can’t help but wonder: How far is the pain now and what is its face?
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