The Sundarban
ByKaty Kelleher
Photos byAnastasia Samoylova/Institute
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 spicy southern terminus in Key West, Florida, it has swallowed many smaller highways (the King’s Motorway, the Some distance off places Motorway) into its length, making one colossal Atlantic Motorway out of many fragmented paths. These a quantity of arteries were formally merged into one by the Joint Board of Interstate Highways within the 1920s, and since then, Route 1 has maintained the look of continuity, its pavement river flowing from north to south and support all but again, seamlessly connecting the cities and towns of the eastern seaboard.
But any individual who has driven Route 1 knows the actual fact: it’s now not a single, static physique of asphalt. It shifts with the gentle, with the day, with the seasons, with the pitstops. They express that you just’ll want to additionally’t step within the identical river twice—you furthermore mght by no plan power the identical road twice. It’s some distance old down and constructed up, blasted apart and fixed support collectively. And not like Route 66, this dual carriageway doesn’t occupy a spot of agreed-upon neon-tinged iconography. Every exit brings its have place of associations, from the shattered-glass mill towns of Massachusetts to the sherbert-painted clapboard siding of South Carolina. “Each and each role along it has its have rhythm, its have wounds and hopes,” says photographer Anastasia Samoylova, whose most most up-to-date physique of labor, Atlantic Straggle, paperwork existence along the roadside. “By the tip, Route 1 felt much less cherish a dual carriageway and more cherish a portrait of persistence: of how other folks and locations preserve on, adapt, and in most cases correct quietly go.”
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Despite a thousand miles between Current England and the Deep South, Samoylova discovered similarities between the states. “The underlying emotion felt similar,” she says. “A quiet determination to hold on to something familiar.” “Historic Reenactor,” Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2024. “Randy’s Bar B Q,” Savannah, Georgia, 2024.
“Each and each role guards its have rhythm, but all of them piece a strategy of looking to belong to something increased than themselves,” Samoylova says. Pictured here: “Gas Boom,” Ormond Seaside, Florida, 2024.
The mission became inspired by a identical endeavor from the 1950s. Unlike Samoylova, who began in her fatherland of Miami, Berenice Abbott began her scamper down Route 1 in 1954 in northern Maine. As she traveled south, she photographed scenes of day-to-day existence, the Ferris wheels and churches, the fruit sellers and parking meters. Abbott, Samoylova says, “understood that the landscape is by no plan just. It reflects the values and blind spots of its time.” In Jacksonville, Florida, Abbott shot a trio of fellows standing by a segregated water fountain. Two of them drink, while one stands and waits, having a gape over his shoulder and straight into Abbott’s lens. It’s a easy image and Samoylova became struck by this depiction of such fashioned cruelty. “She didn’t editorialize; she simply looked,” she says. “My goal became to be in dialogue along side her… Her work gave me a compass, nonetheless now not a diagram. I adopted her sense of openness and curiosity bigger than her footsteps.”
With Route 1 running along the coast, Samoylova found that “The United States unearths itself most clearly along its edges.” “Caprice,” East Harlem, New York, 2024. “Home Mural,” Washington, DC, 2024.
Samoylova was inspired by the lens of famous post-war photographer Berenice Abbott. “She didn’t editorialize; she simply looked.” Pictured here: “Lap Dog,” Davie, Florida, 2025.
From 2020 to 2024, Samoylova made more than one trips through sections of the dual carriageway in her cheerful primitive SUV. The road trip became fragmented, and her stays in every set diversified widely. Some towns were shot in a single day. Once in some time, she’d exhaust a week in a single role, chasing the gentle and assembly the locals. “I started in Florida, the set I are residing,” she explains. “It felt pure to begin at the threshold of vulnerability, in a role the set the effects of local climate trade are rapid and visual.” While Abbott adopted the “most up-to-date of postwar optimism and growth,” Samoylova organized her mission to ticket the “drift of threat in role of the drift of development.”
While Route 1 doesn’t continually hug the flee, its interior sections are inclined to follow the autumn line of American topography, the role the set the Appalachian foothills meet the coastal planes. It’s a road outlined by its proximity to water, and a quantity of Samoylova’s photos screen the weathering and sluggish decay that occurs when the constructed atmosphere is battered by waves. “Touring the Atlantic flee taught me that The United States unearths itself most clearly along its edges,” she says. “What I discovered there became a combination of beauty and fragility, locations repeatedly rebuilding while maintaining onto traces of what got here earlier than.”
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“Each and each role along it has its have rhythm, its have wounds and hopes,” Samoylova says. Pictured here: “Mural,” New London, Connecticut, 2024.
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,
