NEW YORK — “Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans” begins with a set of postcards. That’s doubly appropriate. The show runs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11.
Evans (1903-1975) had a thing for postcards. It was part of his fascination with the American visual vernacular, a fascination that so often found its way into his photographs: from junkyards and Victorian architecture to billboards and signage. The 29 postcards in “Floridas” are from his personal collection (of 9,000!). They’re part of the Evans archive, which the Met owns.
So that’s one thing. The other is Florida being a state (and state of mind) that’s both postcard-pretty and postcard-grotesque. “Florida is ghastly and pleasant where I am,” Evans wrote to a friend in 1934, during his first visit there. Call that duality the Carl Hiaasen Quotient. The fabulous sunsets, the Everglades, the beaches, hurricanes, Miami and Miami Beach (the two are very different), alligators, all that tourism, all that development, a general sense of the Sunshine State as three-ring circus. What better place for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey to have made its winter home? In fact, Evans took photographs to accompany a 1942 Harper’s Bazaar article on the circus and its Sarasota quarters.
Evans needs no introduction. He took some of the most celebrated photographs of the last century: of Alabama, New York, Pennsylvania, even Cuba. He’s not thought of in terms of Florida, though he took more than 600 photographs there over the course of numerous visits. There were magazine and book assignments, as well as trips to see his sister, who lived on an island off the Gulf Coast. Some of the subjects are very Floridian: shuffleboard, a plantation house, boats, pelicans, a souvenir shop, palm trees, a sponge fisherman’s diving suit.
Samoylova does need an introduction; and the quality of her work makes it an introduction worth making. Born in Moscow, in 1984, she has lived in Miami since 2016. She’s made the state her chief subject: from the far south, in the Keys, to the north and west, bordering Georgia and Alabama, with lots of in between — much of it, inevitably, in Miami.
So Evans was an outsider, and Samoylova still is (the distance between Moscow and Miami is vast, with mileage maybe the least of it). But outsider as visitor is a different status from outsider as inhabitant. Evans is American photography’s great classicist, ideally shooting his subjects in a straightforward, full-frontal fashion, preferably at midday, to avoid shadows. (That said, two of the more charming photographs here not only include a prominent shadow. The shadow belongs to Evans.) This characteristic style lends his work a detached, respectful quality, a detachment underscored by most of the photographs being in black and white.
A classicist Samoylova is not, nor would her subject matter call for such an approach, with its tendency to be up-to-the-minute Florida rather than traditional Florida. “Beachgoer, Naples” shows a bare-chested dude with a very large .45 automatic tattoo between hip and navel. “New Condominiums,” with its view of distant towers rising out of a sea of vegetation, looks more like Brazil than Florida. Other titles are self-explanatory: “Rusted Car,” “Roadside Gun Shop, Port Orange,” “Flooded Car,” “Strip Club,” “Abandoned Building on Miami River,” “Gatorama,” “Upside-Down House, Orlando.” No, it’s not part of Walt Disney World.
What those titles don’t convey is the energy and gusto of the images. Unlike Evans’s, Samoylova’s are hung unmatted, with white frames, which makes the subjects (especially the color ones) stand out all the more. “Blue Courtyard, Hollywood” is impressively — and suitably — garish. Florida without color isn’t just Florida diminished and misrepresented. It’s not really Florida.
Samoylova includes a few mixed-media works in the show, collaging paint and photograph. This makes sense, Florida being a very mixed-everything sort of place. Surprisingly enough, the show includes five paintings by Evans: three temperas and two oils. Handsomely spare, they are far amateurish. One of them, “Ship’s Prow,” from 1958, provides the one real link — beyond geography — between the two photographers. Samoylova’s mixed media “Red Boat, St. Augustine,” from 2024, is distant visual kin to the painting. It’s satisfying to think of her and Evans afloat, passing each other like ships in the Florida night.
FLORIDAS: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans
At Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., New York, through May 11 and July 13, respectively. 212-535-7710, www.metmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].