“The first rule of hurricane coverage,” the Florida-based crime novelist Carl Hiaasen once quipped, “is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.”
In Anastasia Samoylova’s photographic series FloodZone, made in the immediate wake of the 2017 hurricane that wreaked havoc on Miami, palm trees are a less graceful symbol of the acute climate anxiety that lies beneath the city’s American dreamscape. Against the art deco facades of Miami Beach they often look abject: uprooted, upended and, in one unforgettable image, balancing precariously against a pale white building above a sickly pink pavement.
