Anastasia Samoylova: Landscape Sublime

Anastasia Samoylova: Landscape Sublime

Crashing waves, snow-capped peaks, and other familiar nature-themed photographs overwhelm the frame in Anastasia Samoylova’s series, Landscape Sublime. As an artist, Samoylova questions the need to contribute to the nearly two billion photographs uploaded to the internet daily, choosing instead to work with images that already exist. Using online source material, she produces imagery that rearticulates the very concept of landscape photography—shifting the focus away from the picturesque landscapes we have come to expect and onto the romanticized genre of nature photography itself.

Culling images from freely available archives such as Flickr, Samoylova searches for the type of idyllic landscapes that have become ubiquitous across nearly every facet of visual media—from desktop images to bottled water advertisements. She then prints these photographs at the size they appear on a computer screen. Using studio props, Samoylova shapes and layers them into thematic and visually disorienting tableaus. In repurposing these commonplace pictures, Samoylova is careful to produce compositions that mesmerize, challenge, and ultimately encourage us to contemplate the unfathomable sum of images in circulation and the effect they have on our perception of nature.

Anastasia Samoylova was born in Moscow and earned an MA from the Russian State University for the Humanities before moving to Illinois to pursue an MFA from Bradley University. She is currently based in Miami, Florida, where she is an artist in residence at Fountainhead Studios. She has exhibited internationally at venues including Aperture Foundation in New York, Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston, Brussels Photography Festival in Belgium, and Pingyao International Photography Festival in China. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the ArtSlant Prize in Paris, Yale University Library, and Stanford University Library. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Foam Magazine, and WIRED magazine. Her first monograph, Landscape Sublime, was published in June 2016.

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