Image Cities takes us on a journey through cities the Globalization and World Cities Research
Network ranks highest according to their degree of "global interconnectedness." We find them in
a process of transformation concealed behind dummy façades onto which a sense of heightened
anticipation has been projected. It would be tempting to read these photographs as a polemic
against the triumph of consumerism and a slowly numbing global visual-economic order that wraps
itself around whatever once felt local and civic. Samoylova's photography is full of masterful
refinements of the existing clichés of urban photography: Citizens dwarfed by giant images.
Faces and bodies refracted through glass. The Pop-Cubism of visual bricolage. The minuscule
human figures that stroll seemingly indifferent through city space while being at least partly
somewhere else in their imaginations¿ their existence already a collage of places and times.
Yet Samoylova consciously engages with cliché takes it apart and reassembles it gambling
that it can be taken to a level of pictorial sophistication that eludes any simple argument or
statement. Instead she invites us to reflect on photography's role in the creation of a gap
between these citie's brand identity and their everyday reality. ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA (*1984)
grew up in Moscow. In 2008 she moved to the United States where she graduated with a master's
degree in Interdisciplinary Art from Bradley University Illinois. Her work explores the
tension between the staged perception of a bombastic materialism and reality. Living and
working in Miami Florida has become the backdrop for her combination of collage-like details
with the genre of the road trip. Her recent series Flood Zones and Floridas have received great
critical acclaim.
