Episode 2: Moving to a Standstill

Anastasia Samoylova

Anastasia Samoylova’s photographs of a changing climate in her Miami neighborhood leads to FloodZone, a 4-year project that documents the tangible and intangible experience of climate change in our everyday.

Listen

Transcript

Episode Transcript

Cameron Peters: Welcome to New Climate Narratives, a podcast investigating our changing climate through the voices that are seeing, imagining, and creating new ways forward. I’m your host, Cameron Peters.

Anastasia Samoylova: It's not always a catastrophe, right? It's not this tangible disaster moment all the time. We have those moments, occasionally, like whenever a hurricane comes or you know, people sharing images during King Tides here. Everybody knows the person who lost something in those King tides; a car, right? A flooded basement. So you learn about those, even if you don't experience it firsthand, you learn about the damage from friends and the community, so there's signs of climate change and that it's not always something that comes from the outside and sort of damages it all at once, right there it's small signifiers of what's to come.

Cameron Peters: If you were to go for a walk in your neighborhood, what does a changing climate look like? Can you see it? Hear it? Do you feel it?

Identifying signs of climate change in our everyday lives can be challenging, even as it rapidly and devastatingly impacts our landscapes and communities. Witnessing the change in a day or a moment simply feels intangible; it is too large for us to see. Or, we know it by another name, the symptom of something that has become normalized, reflected in a flooded street or parking lot.

But what if these consequences are uncovered in a different way that names the slow change for what it is within our lived experiences of environment in society? Documenting climate change over time in our everyday reality makes the seemingly intangible understandable.

Anastasia Samoylova: My name is Anastasia Samolylova. I'm an artist and photographer and I'm based in Miami, Florida.

Cameron Peters: In her recent photography book, FloodZone published by Steidl in 2019, Anastasia uses observational photography to record the tangible and intangible experience of climate change in our everyday.

Emerging from walks around her neighborhood in Miami, FloodZone has grown into a rich series that reorients us to the everyday experiences of a changing climate, creating a new lens for us to reflect, seek out, challenge, and discover our own shared climate experiences.

Anastasia Samoylova: I grew up in Russia. I grew up in Moscow, huge city, about 10 million people live there and 10 more commute for work. So that was sort of my environment. It was urban environment. And if you picture a typical Russian metropolis, you know, tall towers made of concrete and glass, that was very much my reality and sort of contained parks throughout. You can't say it's not green at all, but it certainly all sort of divided into public recreation, green spaces versus the gray, you know, paved over streets.

Cameron Peters: From early on, this contrast between natural environment and human-built environment, and our experience of those spaces captured Anastasia’s attention. It is a theme that can be traced across her art-making.

Anastasia Samoylova: I think my interest was shaped by precisely that division, you know, what's made for getting a human recreation and special experience of the natural landscape, which you had to sort of seek out, you know, you have to travel to experience even if it was just like a subway ride and then some sort of commute to that green space. Most Russians have a little cabin somewhere out in the country. It's a very sort of very popular cultural phenomenon. Everybody, you know, all throughout sort of classes. If you can afford to put it together, you know, yourself out of some plywood and boards, you do it. Because city life can be so, of course, stressful and lacking in many aspects and the density of in the commutes, the crazy commutes in the subway. So maybe that's what created the special appreciation of that natural landscape. And then the contrast between that and urban life and city, the urbanscape. So my interest in the environment was shaped by the contrast, which is ever so present in a place like Miami for instance, right?

Cameron Peters: Receiving her first degree in environmental design in Moscow, Anastasia’s was introduced to photography as a tool to record her models of the environments and buildings she created for class critiques.

Anastasia Samoylova: I got intrigued by photography's ability to sort of shift our understanding of scale of things. You could really play with light and create this illusion of a much bigger space by just sort of altering your angle.

Cameron Peters: As photography seeped into Anastasia’s life, she was acutely aware of the role of photography in shaping our perceptions of the environment and began to investigate it in her work and experiences.

Anastasia Samoylova: So that question always interests me, how photography shapes our perception of the world. It creates this sort of imagined geography as well because we tend to obviously believe the pictures that we see, photographic images…And then you associate different places with the images of that place that you have seen, even if you haven't visited yet. You know, if I say Paris, you can already sort of picture what it looks like, whether you've been there or not, right? Because of this sort of collective memory that's shaped by photography.

Cameron Peters: Creating a collective memory is crucial for community meaning-making. It is how we remember, how we can relate to something we may have never experienced ourselves. By deciding what to remember and how we remember, we shape our sense of place.

And Anastasia experienced this firsthand after moving to the United States to pursue her MFA.

Anastasia Samoylova: So I would look at Ansel Adams, you know, this great American photographer of the American West predominantly. And so, I had this sort of idea of what the American West looks like and Yosemite in particular, that was my number one destination to visit when I moved and the glorious, you know, high contrast black and white mountains, and then arriving in the park. I think it was my first semester as a graduate student here. You kind of have to stay on your path and it's filled with tourists. A lot of trash, the mountains are obviously grand and majestic, not black and white or high contrast and all over. And so, sort of analyzing this dichotomy between this imagined picture of the world versus the experienced world and the things sort of in-between and what you can produce as an image-maker out of that experience.

Cameron Peters: Anastasia received her MFA in 2011 and spent the next few years as a professor of art and photography in the Midwest and East Coast. In 2016, she moved to Miami, beginning a full-time practice as an artist.

Anastasia Samoylova: And then the whole move to Miami…It was just so rich in material and there's so much to investigate that it seemed like photography, especially observational photography, was the medium to choose because it's always, you know, a record besides being an art form.

Cameron Peters: Miami offered Anastasia an exciting space to create and new complexities to document.

Anastasia Samoylova: It's complex, it's way more complicated than it's made to look, right? Especially in pictures. And I think this is what propelled this project of mine; FloodZone. I think it’s way more layered than it's known to the outside world, right? And again, as somebody who came in here with maybe just one prior visit years ago to Miami Beach as a tourist, and it was the short one, five days I think, I found it fascinating. So many contrasts all throughout, and that's what inspired me to take on observational photography. Because again, I don't come into the medium from photojournalism or any sort of photographic background. I was always an artist and I was working spatially, you know, three-dimensionally predominantly. But it seemed like the fitting medium and I just needed to record all these complexities that I've encountered, but never imagined to be here.

Cameron Peters: And this was where she began witnessing a changing climate in South Florida.

Anastasia Samoylova: First moment when I experienced climate change… So, I think this was the first sort of investigation on my behalf and then moving to South Florida in Miami in 2016, there was this first little hurricane; hurricane Matthew, I think it was category three. And then a year after there was hurricane Irma…I was photographing just very speculatively at that point, just recording sort of the environment around me, but then after some conversations with the locals and picking up some literature on the subject, that's when I guess I realized that this is climate change we're dealing with and not just sort of a naturally occurring phenomenon.

So hurricanes were a revelation, especially Irma that I think was approaching as category five. And then it was category four when it reached us. I remember it all very vividly because my family and I were stranded in Miami Beach. I think because of the 2016 sort of false alarm with hurricane Matthew, we didn't take it too seriously. But when there was this mandatory evacuation order, by the time I got scared there was really no way to evacuate, there was no gas anywhere for miles and, you know, the traffic lines were insane. So, I got stuck here. The sound of the hurricane, I remember distinctly, was the scariest part. And then the next morning I went out with my camera to document the damages. I live on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. And so, I remember the ocean drive and I biked there and the ocean drive was covered in sand. It was crazy. I think that was the year when that octopus was found in a flooded garage.

Cameron Peters: Creating FloodZone became a process of uncovering the layers Miami offered her. Walking around the city with her camera, her project began to touch others and invite conversation.

Anastasia Samoylova: I get approached all the time. People ask, you know, what are you working on? Is it a documentary? And when I say it's FloodZone, people open up and say, Oh, well, let me tell you my story.

Cameron Peters: What FloodZone became was a place of connection between Anastasia’s experiences and those of the strangers she met on the street.

Anastasia Samoylova: I think it's their personal experiences. You know, in my case the project didn't come out of the ether for me at all. It came out of, again, this personal firsthand experience with the subject. Right? So having to run and park your car in the city, you know, municipal garage on the elevated level, figuring out your provisions for the time of the hurricane and then the subsequent power outage, right? So we didn't have power for, I think, five days after Irma, how to feed your kid during that time, you know, and no power again, it's hot. How do you create some sort of air circulation when we are so dependent, right, the entire state is completely dependent on air conditioning for its existence. Yeah. So the term FloodZone, I think it's just very relatable for anybody who lives here. Climate change will affect people differently or depending on where they live. And I guess the economical cushion as well, you know, that preparedness is key for somebody whose primary residence is here in the FloodZone.

Cameron Peters: When you think of South Florida, Miami, or the U.S. Southern Coast, images immediately come to mind, locations highly saturated with prescribed images, whether it is from a postcard or breaking news. So, what does it take to see something new?

Anastasia Samoylova: When I was just starting out and again, as a former educator I also was looking into the existing history of the imagery around the subject. Right? And it doesn't take long to research. You can just Google image, search climate change photography, and you'll see polar bears and melting ice caps sort of dramatic, but not very relatable imagery. That's what I was noticing. And so the idea was to make it more relatable and again, to portray this everyday experience of living with changing climate. I don't think there can be such thing as completed archive on the subject because we haven't even experienced the worst of it yet. Right? We know that this is only getting worse.

Cameron Peters: Anastasia’s images of change are unlike the ones we see on TV or on breaking news. While photojournalistic coverage of climate change has become much more extensive, typing in the words Climate Change in major stock image sites still brings melting ice and polar bears to the forefront. So this leaves us with the question, how does a visual canon expand?

Over the course of four years, Anastasia’s FloodZone invites the viewer to slow down. In this slowing down, we see layers of color, details, and moments within our everyday experience that hadn’t been previously recognized.

Anastasia Samoylova: So the change, I think, comes out naturally after photographing same places over a period of time. Right? So there's that. It serves as, again, record of a place. We know for fact that Miami will not look like it looks now in even a decade, right? There are certain areas that already flood a lot more than they used to. So I think, you know, photography and time are so intertwined, right, that over certain period of time, this is just going to show on its own.

Cameron Peters: Through the every day, Anastasia records symbols of climatic change. And this offers us space to both pause and feel. In FloodZone, this is perfectly exemplified in the image of the Cape Romano Dome House on the West Coast near Marco Island.

Anastasia Samoylova: You probably know the structure is local. There were six domes which is now entirely submerged in water and only accessible by boat. I just think that's such a great metaphor for the whole thing. And by the way, most of the book is really just allegorical images, rather than sort of direct depictions of climate change. So with the dome house, the whole story is it was built, It looks like this sort of surreal structure, kind of like a, to me it reminded me of some creatures in the Salvador Dali's paintings. It was a futuristic dome long stilts in water, but it was actually built on land with 700 feet setback from the shore in the eighties by this oil magnate from Midwest, I think, as a vacation home. And that throughout the years, beach erosion, hurricanes, and sea-level rise rendered it entirely submerged in water. So now it's this sort of abandoned ruin that just sits there by the Island. And in my photo, it's in this sort of ghostly, pearlescent light. I don't remember the time of day. I think it was a late afternoon, this kind of shimmery and it looks a bit like a Mirage. So I think to me that's sort of the symbol and the quite direct, I guess, depiction of sea-level rise.

Cameron Peters: What do these allegorical photos offer us? Images that allow us to confront through one perspective, the everyday experience of environmental change happening on a local level.

Anastasia Samoylova: With climate change, you know, this drive to sort of catastrophize it. While I'm sure the issue is alarming and needs to be discussed widely, I don't think that catastrophe and disaster photography is necessarily serving that purpose well. What it tends to do is desensitize its audience, you know, and we've been seeing that with wildfire photography from this summer, right? You can almost close your eyes and picture the silhouette of those firefighters against, you know, house ablaze. So this is already becoming a formula and I'm very careful about representation in that way.

So yeah, in terms of disaster photography, there's also this issue of sort of exploitation of your, especially of people, the victims of whatever catastrophes to serve sure, the news, right? Drama sells best, unfortunately. There's this hunger for drama, right? Dramatic moments. Those are the images that get put on covers and circulate better.

But of course that itself should be problematized, I think because we're not dealing with drama all the time. And we do need to communicate that this is an everyday occurrence and not just, you know, wait for dramatic moments. And images like that also imply resolution, right? Quick resolution that this is going to be, you know, the fire's going to be put out and that the hurricane debris is going to be cleared. But then how do you show the everyday-ness of living with this And the increasing impact?

Cameron Peters: For a global issue like climate change, it is vital to create space for the personal – space that allows us to take in the information and then intimately feel and relate.

Anastasia Samoylova: For me, it was the channel through which I, you know, communicated…complex ideas about how it feels like to live in a place that's changing so rapidly and knowing what's to come and how to sort of psychologically prepare for what's going to happen.

Cameron Peters: Throughout history, art has been used to heal at a community level. This is a space where art can take us: where we can use it to process and see what’s in front of us in different ways.

Anastasia Samoylova: I want to imply that this is not a finite event, right? This doesn't just end once the flooding has receded or whatever the fire was put out. This is just the beginning of events unfolding, right? And this is very much the time to find answers. All right? Not just panic and give up and just sort of let it go and let the next generations deal with it, but this is the time to start acting on different levels too. Local, national, and so on.

Cameron Peters: I wonder if this offers us a new way of moving forward, into our collective future. When we see photographs of environments that are familiar and known to us but are offered back to us in new ways, we might ask new questions, feel something different, and maybe even imagine new possibilities.

Anastasia Samoylova: I hope the viewer will pause. I'm hoping to inspire further investigation into the subject. Right? An informed opinion is what I'm after. And a singular image, even the photo essay, can only do so much…We tend to take it at face value. You know, whatever's pictured must be the truth. You know, just because the image is documentary or even photojournalistic. It's still somebody's singular perspective, right? It's somebody's point of view. So what I'm hoping to inspire by leaving my images wide open and not picturing, you know, drama or disaster at its peak is for the viewer to do their research, you know, to inspire people to read up to have these conversations, right? To open up a dialogue, because there's still very few answers around. We know, at least we know the numbers, we know the statistics, right? You can't deny that. You can argue all you want about the causes of climate change. But again, you can't deny the consequences. Right? And so in that way, I'm hoping again to build that bridge and to leave space there for the dialogue.

Cameron Peters: This is community building -- seeing experiences recognized and reflected in public spaces. And whether that perspective is similar to Anastasia’s depiction of change or not, this is where art can lead to conversation and maybe with time and attention, a new kind of collective memory-making and, perhaps, a deeper sense of personal hope.

Anastasia Samoylova: What does hope look like? … I think communication is key. Informed decisions. Informing those who are not able to get that information. You know, concrete example would be communities in low-lying areas that will certainly be affected by climate change, right? Communities that will certainly need to relocate, you know, having them be prepared for that relocation. I don't think anybody's doubting, you know, what's happening in Florida Keys that it's not going to be long-term living over there, right, when you have government level conversations on starting ferry service as opposed to continuing to service some roads. So it's things like that, informing people, right? Making things transparent and…allowing time and resources to prepare.

Cameron Peters: Art is a foundational part of our collective climate reckoning, solution building, and healing across genres and mediums. It can create an amazing movement by allowing us to see and engage with ourselves, our environments, and each other in deeper and more expansive ways. It engages our imaginations. And we are just at the very beginning of discovering what possibilities will emerge.

Which is why as we move through this season, we are going to put art next to an episode on science and medicine and activism, and a whole host of additional fields and ways of knowing. Because to understand climate, we have to deepen our context of place and open up our imaginations.

New Climate Narratives is produced, edited, and hosted by Cameron Peters. Sound Design and music by Miles Shebar. Special thanks to Anastasia Samolylova.

You can write to us at newclimatenarratives@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @newclimatenarratives, on Twitter @ncnarratives, and on Facebook @newclimatenarrarives. As always you can be the first to know when a new episode drops by subscribing wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Resources

Book Recommendations by Anastasia Samoylova: