Anastasia Samoylova: Image Cities

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.00Exhibition: Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, Spain (16.02. - 14.05.2023).00.

• | Author: Victoria Del Val
• | Publisher: Hatje Cantz
• | Publication Date: Jun 06, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 168 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 3775754806
• | ISBN-13: 9783775754804