In pictures: Meet the ghosts of the US’s East Coast

Anastasia Samoylova did not expect her latest photography exhibition would find its perfect companion in a Hollywood movie. Yet, as she tells it, there are plenty of parallels between her show and accompanying photobook, Atlantic Coast, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s thriller One Battle After Another. “There’s a lot of overlap,” she says. “It’s just a lot of the same feelings and anxieties channelled through art.”

Both the film, which stars the real-life art collector Leonardo DiCaprio as a former leftist militant chasing his kidnapped daughter, and the photo series, debuting at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, centre on a road trip of sorts. While Anderson sends his cast through the California hinterlands, Samoylova journeyed along the old US Route 1 on the East Coast, inspired by a similar trip taken by the photographer Berenice Abbott in 1954.

Through Samoylova’s lens, we discover a country in transition between a grand, decaying past and an uncertain, alarming future. The trappings of Americana litter the show like neglected artefacts of a vanished culture, replaced by new and meaner structures. One shot in Jacksonville shows a concrete highway overpass towering over an aging colonial-style building. Another image shows a woman in a sports car in Miami in front of a demolition site and a prison facility; a decal on the arm of an excavator features the grim slogan: “Watch it come down!”

The artist has spent much of her career capturing uncanny scenes through photographs that disguise a conceptual eye in a documentary style. Part of what makes her so adept at chronicling the present moment is her perspective as an immigrant, particularly one from Russia. Born in the waning days of the Soviet Union, she came of age during the “wild 1990s” of Russia’s chaotic transition to a market economy. She saw a class of oligarchs take over the country’s politics, eventually leading to Vladimir Putin’s repressive autocracy. The consumerist façades thrown up by his regime to disguise its abuses partially inspired her 2023 project, Image Cities.

Samoylova completed Atlantic Coast in stages starting in 2020, when she travelled to Charleston in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. There, she photographed a statue of John C. Calhoun being removed from the city’s Marion Square, one of several moments when her project crossed paths with history; in 2024 she was in Baltimore and photographed the destroyed Francis Scott Key Bridge a week after it collapsed.

She finished after the Norton Museum offered her a show—“It was a great sort of kick in the butt to go and get on the road again and complete it,” she says—but Samoylova had the idea for the project in 2017 after moving to Miami. The first show she saw in the city was an exhibition of Abbott’s Route 1 photos at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University.

Images of Florida recur throughout Atlantic Coast, emphasising the state’s status as a kind of mirror reflecting the nation’s id, the place where the US’s worst impulses are realised. A photo in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District gives a macabre commentary on the state’s mixture of stunning scenery and sordid politics. Against a vivid sunset backdrop, a wire coat hanger suspended from a powerline has been bent into a commentary on Florida’s abortion ban, declaring: “Affordable Healthcare.”

• Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast, until 1 March 2026, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach