Anastasia Samoylova. Image Cities

The Image Cities project by russian-american photographer Anastasia Samoylova was the winning application in the first edition of the biennial KBr Photo Award, launched by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021.

Images Cities is an exhaustive and conscientious work, carried out in various locations, on the integration of photography and image in the urban environment. Samoylova renews the vision and language of documentary photography in a working process that she defends as artisanal: the images are juxtaposed, creating surprising visual effects in which the human figure is almost always absent and, if it appears at all, it does so on a minimal scale compared to the grandeur of buildings and advertisements. His images express the ambivalences and contradictions of today’s urban landscape: while cities try to promote their individuality, their spaces are moving towards a generic scenario in which the specific configuration of each city loses its singularity in an anonymous architecture of steel and glass.

Curator: Victoria del Val (Fundación MAPFRE).