A photographer's epic East Coast road trip in search of Berenice Abbott
Traveling the Atlantic highway from Florida to Maine, Anastasia Samoylova found a country in the midst of change, loss—and endurance.
In the pantheon of American highways, Route 1 stands apart. Snaking some 2,300 miles from the cold Canadian border in Fort Kent, Maine to the bleached bright southern terminus in Key West, Florida, it has swallowed many smaller highways (the King’s Highway, the Overseas Highway) into its length, making one great Atlantic Highway out of many fragmented paths. These numerous arteries were officially merged into one by the Joint Board of Interstate Highways in the 1920s, and since then, Route 1 has maintained the illusion of continuity, its pavement river flowing from north to south and back again, seamlessly connecting the cities and towns of the eastern seaboard.
Yet anyone who has driven Route 1 knows the truth: it is not a single, static body of asphalt. It shifts with the light, with the day, with the seasons, with the pitstops. They say you can’t step in the same river twice—you also never drive the same road twice. It is worn down and built up, blasted apart and glued back together. And unlike Route 66, this highway doesn’t have a suite of agreed-upon neon-tinged iconography. Every exit brings its own set of associations, from the shattered-glass mill towns of Massachusetts to the sherbert-painted clapboard siding of South Carolina. “Each place along it has its own rhythm, its own wounds and hopes,” says photographer Anastasia Samoylova, whose most recent body of work, Atlantic Coast, documents life along the roadside. “By the end, Route 1 felt less like a highway and more like a portrait of endurance: of how people and places hold on, adapt, and sometimes just quietly fade.”
The project was inspired by a similar undertaking from the 1950s. Unlike Samoylova, who began in her hometown of Miami, Berenice Abbott started her journey down Route 1 in 1954 in northern Maine. As she traveled south, she photographed scenes of daily life, the Ferris wheels and churches, the fruit sellers and parking meters. Abbott, Samoylova says, “understood that the landscape is never neutral. It reflects the values and blind spots of its time.” In Jacksonville, Florida, Abbott shot a trio of men standing by a segregated water fountain. Two of them drink, while one stands and waits, looking over his shoulder and directly into Abbott’s lens. It is a straightforward image and Samoylova was struck by this depiction of such commonplace cruelty. “She didn’t editorialize; she simply looked,” she says. “My goal was to be in dialogue with her… Her work gave me a compass, but not a map. I followed her sense of openness and curiosity more than her footsteps.”
From 2020 to 2024, Samoylova made multiple trips through sections of the highway in her comfortable old SUV. The road trip was fragmented, and her stays in each location varied widely. Some towns were shot in a single day. Sometimes, she’d spend a week in one place, chasing the light and meeting the locals. “I started in Florida, where I live,” she explains. “It felt natural to begin at the edge of vulnerability, in a place where the effects of climate change are immediate and visible.” While Abbott followed the “current of postwar optimism and expansion,” Samoylova organized her project to trace the “flow of risk rather than the flow of progress.”
While Route 1 doesn’t always hug the coast, its interior sections tend to adhere to the fall line of American topography, the place where the Appalachian foothills meet the coastal planes. It is a road defined by its proximity to water, and many of Samoylova’s images show the weathering and slow decay that happens when the built environment is battered by waves. “Traveling the Atlantic coast taught me that America reveals itself most clearly along its edges,” she says. “What I found there was a mix of beauty and fragility, places constantly rebuilding while holding onto traces of what came before.”
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As she shot, certain patterns arose. Many images feature crisp or wavering reflections—of palm trees shining from the hood of a vintage car or crimson fireworks on the surface of a dark bay. “Maybe because they carry a sense of uncertainty that feels so familiar now,” she suggests. Samoylova also found herself drawn to the “in-between spaces” created by fences, scaffolding, and floodlines. “They started to feel like the country’s pulse, symbols of how things are constantly being built, fixed, or fenced off,” she says. Although state borders didn’t delineate a sharp shift in either landscape or culture, Samoylova marked the slower, more subtle ways that both changed as she worked her way north. The landscape began to close off, vistas hemmed in by settlement and woodland, as did the people. “But the underlying emotion felt similar,” she says. “A quiet determination to hold on to something familiar.”
She continues, “what stood out to me was how identity expresses itself in small gestures. In Georgia, it might be through faith or community; in the Carolinas, through memory and preservation; in Maine, through self-reliance and distance. Each place guards its own rhythm, yet all of them share a sense of wanting to belong to something larger than themselves.”
Samoylova’s dual perspective as an immigrant and an American citizen informed the making of Atlantic Coast, enabling her to switch between roles of observer and participant. Sometimes, she felt herself an outsider peering in, particularly in the places where “past is performed as heritage.” The thickness of nostalgia created a distancing effect for the Russian-born photographer. However, she reports just as many moments of connection, when Route 1 felt less like a mythical government creation and more like a string of open doors. “A conversation in a diner, watching fireworks from a motel window, or seeing a hairdresser calmly continue their work during a snowstorm,” she says. “These gestures reminded me that the country isn’t an abstraction; it’s made up of small, human continuities.”
