Anastasia Samoylova: Image Cities

Imaginaries in reality photography's role in the visual culture of the city

Reinventing the Image of the Global Metropolis

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.