In Image Cities, Anastasia Samoylova looks at how photographic images, advertising, and architecture are reshaping the visual experience of the contemporary city. Her photographs bring together billboards, storefronts, reflections, buildings, and passing figures, creating layered compositions in which the boundaries between the real city and its image begin to blur.
The project spans seventeen cities, including New York, Paris, London, Zurich, Tokyo, and Milan. Across these different urban environments, Samoylova observes a growing visual uniformity: international brands, real-estate advertising, and highly photogenic architecture increasingly shape how cities present themselves and how we experience them.
Samoylova’s photographs are carefully constructed from the visual fragments she encounters in the street. Reflections overlap with buildings, people are dwarfed by advertisements, and different planes of the city come together almost like a collage. The result is visually compelling while raising questions about consumerism, globalization, and the role photography itself plays in creating the image of the contemporary city.
Image Cities was the winning project of the inaugural KBr Photo Award, established by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021. The book was published by Hatje Cantz in 2023, with texts by David Campany and Victoria del Val.
Anastasia Samoylova: Image Cities
Hatje Cantz / Fundación MAPFRE, 2023
168 pages / 100 photographs
Hardcover / English
Signed copy
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