US Route 1 runs approximately 2,370 miles from start to finish. From Key West, Florida to Fort Kent, Maine at the Canadian border, it is the longest north-to-south road in the US. In other words, if you want to travel the East Coast of America from tip to tip, Route 1 is your path. In the Summer of 1954, American photographer Bernice Abbott set out with two friends to document the time in the ever transient face of the country. On the road trip from Maine to Florida, the photographer took more than 2400 negatives. In speaking of the work, Abbott said, “In broad terms the work I have done here is really the American scene, which I think is important to photograph because the United States is such a changing country and is still young. Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed the subject becomes part of the past.
Seventy years later, renowned photographer Anastasia Samoylova retraced Abbott’s trip in reverse–from Florida to Maine. Beginning in her home state of Florida and ending in Maine, Samoylova’s photos trace the enduring impact of Route 1 today. In Atlantic Coast, the photographer revisits the communities transformed by the interstate. It’s a testament to how infrastructure continues to shape the American landscape. Taking a second look at the landscape once documented by Abbott, Samoylova provides a closer look at an America forever changed by the unrelenting expansion of industry, commerce and development. She also captures the tenacity and unfortunate displacement of people and wildlife in the book. Here she asks what it means to be American today, probing the myths of freedom, movement, and belonging embedded in the idea of the open road.
Samoylova is no stranger to documenting the changing landscapes. Her solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Floridas offers a kaleidoscopic, somewhat contradictory portrait of the state’s layered cultural and political identity. In Image Cities (2023), she studied the impact of media saturation on the urban landscape. Her recent book draws parallels to Robert Frank’s The Americans which defined a new visual language of cultural critique. Atlantic Coast continues on Frank’s visual depiction of a country fragmented by environmental crisis, political nostalgia, and unchecked development, themes approached by many artists today.
The book, copublished by Aperture and Norton Museum of Art, is filled with a mixture of black & white and colored images. Dreamlike images mix together with slice-of-life, photojournalistic photos. It’s Americana and artistry all in one. Samoylova’s layered images capture the tension between the remnants of mid-century optimism and a deeper sense of social and ecological dislocation. The artist takes you on a journey through streets, landscapes, towns and businesses along the way as she captures an ever changing Atlantic Coast filled with character, grit and passion. The book’s release coincides with a solo exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, opening was on November 15.
Elizabeth Hazard
Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast is copublished by Aperture and Norton Museum of Art, and is available at aperture.org/books.
