Growing up in Florida, I’ve always felt how easily the landscape becomes a screen for other people’s fantasies—a place that sells light and illusion in equal measure. The exhibition Anastasia Samoylova / Walker Evans: Florida, which brings together over fifty works spanning nearly a century, places two visions in dialogue: Evans, with his steady, unsentimental eye on a mid-century Florida still being carved by migration, tourism, and quiet labor; and Samoylova, capturing a hyper-saturated, fractured terrain on the brink—a Florida unraveling under its own image. What strikes me in seeing their work together isn’t just how time has shifted the look of the place, but how both artists frame Florida as something staged—a performance shaped by myth and money, in sharp contrast to the unadorned realities of the people who live, worship, and labor here, carrying the state’s deeper rhythms in their daily lives.

Evans first arrived in Florida in 1934, commissioned to photograph a resort in Hobe Sound, just north of West Palm Beach. Later, in 1941, he returned with another commission, this time under the title Forgotten Florida, a body of work that moved along the state’s west coast documenting roadside attractions, mobile homes, plant life, and vernacular architecture. His black-and-white images, stripped of glamour, quietly insist on the textures of daily life. The postcards he collected—penny prints and chromolithographs of Florida attractions from

1900–1930—offer another register of his Florida archive: ephemera that chart the rapid expansion of tourism. Taken together, his photographs and collections depict a state caught between poverty and promise, in sharp contrast to the glossy narratives of leisure that circulated in the national imagination. Even Evans’s later figurative paintings made on Anna Maria Island in 1958—Anna Maria, Ship’s Prow, Shell House—echo a folk sensibility, offering a counterpoint to his more austere photographic practice.

For me, coming of age in Jacksonville meant something different than Evans’s Forgotten Florida. Jacksonville sits on the seam of inland and coastal life—not quite the tourist Florida of beaches and resorts, but a city shaped by working people, migration, and resilience. I remember the interiority of the state not as image but as intimacy: the cars bumping with bass as they drive along the strip of malls, the city’s creative pulse carrying heat into the air, the folks and neighbors who kept histories alive on porches, beauty salons, and corner stores. These lived textures rarely surface in Evans’s photographs. His detachment registers the structures but misses the heartbeat of the First Coast—the way people made life within and beyond the landscape he cataloged.

Samoylova, by contrast, began her project in 2016 from a very different position: living and working in Miami, yet consciously navigating the line between insider and outsider. Her series, FloodZone, foregrounded the environmental precarity of South Florida, with its vulnerability to rising sea levels and the fragility of the built environment. Her later series, Floridas, expanded that scope: crisscrossing the state by car, from the Keys to the Panhandle, she cataloged its contradictions. A beachgoer in Naples reclines in a scene of leisure, but just down the road, she photographs a Naples gun shop, its stark façade part of the same cultural fabric. A condominium rises in Bonita Springs while a mirror in Miami reflects the fragmented Venus of consumer desire. Her color-saturated images, at once lush and fractured, feel like postcards ofcollapse—familiar and seductive, yet unstable, as if the image itself is buckling under the weight of myth.

And yet, living in Jacksonville—Duval, as we call it—taught me how much of Florida happens beyond the postcard frame. Where Samoylova’s Miami-based perspective shows collapse through mirrors, glass, and fragments, my memory sees it through people—families preparing for hurricanes, workers building and rebuilding what storms erase, the vernacular gestures of survival. The spectacle of Samoylova’s images resonates, but it also feels distant from the stubborn ordinariness of communities who continue to live here without performance, shaping Florida from within rather than staging it for an outside eye.

Both artists, though separated by decades, frame Florida through a lens of partiality. Evans, a white man from Missouri, approached the state with a Northern detachment, drawn by commissions and collections that inevitably staged Florida for elsewhere. Samoylova, a Russian-born woman, comes to Florida as both immigrant and resident, her photographs conscious of straddling that line between belonging and estrangement. In their work, Florida appears not so much lived as performed—projected outward as an image for tourists, investors, or readers. And yet, as someone raised in Jacksonville, I know a Florida that resists staging. Its performances are not for show but for sustenance: Sunday revivals, kitchen-table rituals, the small solidarities of neighbors making community amid the heat and the salt. For me, Florida is not a spectacle but soil, not just a projection but a lived contradiction.

Seen together, Evans and Samoylova map Florida as mirage and material, history and hallucination. Their juxtapositions underscore how the state has always been imagined at the edge of collapse—whether economic, environmental, or aesthetic. What their work leaves unsaid, however, is just as telling: the racialized histories of labor, migration, and erasure that underpin Florida’s dreamscapes. To witness these images as a Floridian, and specifically as someone who grew up in Jacksonville, is to hold a double vision—to recognize the staging, and to insist on the lives that remain beyond the frame.