15 January 2023: 10×10 hosted a salon with artist Anastasia Samoylova, editor David Campany and photographer Stanley Greenberg at dieFirma in Manhattan’s East Village. Samoylova and Campany discussed Floridas (Steidl, 2022), and Greenberg talked about Springs and Wells—Manhattan and the Bronx (Fw:Books, 2021) and Olmsted Trees (Hirmer Publishers, 2022).
Floridas (Steidl, 2022) dives into that state’s dizzying combination of fantasy and reality. Walker Evans witnessed modern Florida emerging in the 1930s, with its blend of cultures, waves of tourism, stark beauty and blatant vulgarity. He photographed there until the 1970s, making Polaroids that still feel contemporary. Anastasia Samoylova inherits what Evans saw coming. With intelligence and humor, she picks her way through the seductions and disappointments of a place that symbolizes the contradictions of the United States today. In Floridas, editor David Campany presents photographs by Samoylova and Evans in parallel, weaving past and present, switching between black-and-white and color imagery.
Anastasia Samoylova is an artist who moves between observational photography and studio practice. Her work explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. Recent exhibitions include the Eastman Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art and The Photographer’s Gallery, London. In 2022 Samoylova was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Previous books include FloodZone (Steidl, 2019). (@anasamoylova)
A curator and writer, David Campany is the author of over twenty publications, including On Photographs (2020), A Handful of Dust (2015), Walker Evans: the magazine work (2014) and Photography and Cinema (2008). He has edited two of Anastasia Samoylova’s books: FloodZone and Floridas. Campany is Curator at Large for the International Center of Photography, and teaches at the University of Westminster, London. (@davidcampany)
Stanley Greenberg’s Springs and Wells—Manhattan and the Bronx (Fw:Books, 2021) is a rephotographic survey of sites documented by James Ruell Smith around 1900. Smith wandered the city on his bicycle to photograph and write about springs and wells that supplied local residents with groundwater, while they waited to be connected to the city’s new water system. From 2016–20, Greenberg revisited and photographed each of those sites either by foot or bicycle. This book includes Smith’s original photographs and text, along with Greenberg’s contemporary images.
Olmsted Trees (Hirmer Publishers, 2022) is a collection of Stanley Greenberg’s photographs of trees planted by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr — the father of landscape architecture in the United States. The trees are located in public parks designed by Olmsted in the nineteenth Century, in New York, Boston, Rochester, Buffalo, Washington, Chicago and several other cities.
Brooklyn photographer Stanley Greenberg is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship along with grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, NYSCA, NYFA and the Graham Foundation. He has had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the MIT Museum. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. Greenberg has also published Invisible New York (1998), Waterworks (2003) and CODEX: New York (2019) as well as several other books. (@stanleygreenberg)
A big thank you to Victor, Shiori and dieFirma for hosting this salon.