Anastasya Samoylova, "Image Cities" in the KBr space of the Mapfre Foundation

The KBr Photo Award was founded in 2021 with the aim of recognizing and supporting a photographic project every two years through an exhibition and the publication of a book. Given that documentary photography is a fundamental element of Fundación Mapfre's photographic collections, this award particularly encourages projects of this genre. The first edition of 2021 recognized the American photographer of Russian origin Anastasya Samoylova, and now, consequently, the KBr space in Barcelona is offering the Image Cities exhibition.

The recognition of Anastasya Samoylova is not anecdotal or one-off. She is a photographer trained between Russia and the United States who broke into the international photography circuit in the mid-2010s thanks to highly acclaimed projects such as the book Landscape Sublime (2016) or FloodZone (2018). The whole of his work is characterized by building photographic projects inspired by documentary and landscaping, under a perspective focused both on the ecosocial crisis of contemporaneity, in the context of climate change and its consequences, and on the visual ecology that it surrounds us through our vernacular and internet photographic culture. More recently, she has published Floridas (2022), where the photographer, in dialogue with images by Walker Evans from a few decades earlier, explores the contradictions and eccentricities that in a way dismantle clichés and myths about this region of the United States.

Within the framework of the KBr Award, Fundación Mapfre recognized in 2021 the quality and originality of Samoylova's proposal. It was a documentary project that investigated the integration of the image in the urban environment, aware that this is an increasingly frequent and common phenomenon. The project began that same year between Moscow and New York and has evolved to include other European cities, such as Madrid and Barcelona, as well as Tokyo, thanks to the financial support of the prize. Therefore, in Image Cities the photographer examines how some cities negotiate and manage the difficult balance between local social and historical values with the homogenizing effects of the global era and neoliberalism. That is to say, for example, the homogenization that is applied through modern glass architecture or in the large brands of commercial establishments, which are spread throughout Western cities. In this sense, the author investigates the role that photography plays in the creation of the image of a city in these circumstances. In addition, it examines the distance between the discourse that urban administrations promote about the individual and local of a city and the reality of the global world.