This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.
Last month, even with her long lens, Anastasia Samoylova didn’t particularly stand out among the several dozen people who had joined a boat tour of New York, many of whom also had cameras of all shapes and sizes trained on the coastal skyline.
While the Metropolitan Museum of Art was too far inland to see from the water, it was looming large for Samoylova, a Russian-born, Miami-based artist, as she talked and took pictures of the cityscape streaming by.
That’s because a new photography exhibition that opened earlier this month at the Met is a career catapult for Samoylova (pronounced Sam-OY-lo-va), for whom milestones like a solo show at a New York gallery have remained elusive.
The Met show establishes Samoylova as only the second woman to present such a sizable photo show at the museum during her lifetime; the last was in 1992 when the Met presented a retrospective of Helen Levitt — a mentee and friend of Evans — who was also relatively unknown then.
