Photographer Anastasia Samoylova embarked on an ambitious multi-year project documenting life along America's iconic Route 1, drawing inspiration from legendary mid-century photographer Berenice Abbott. From 2020 to 2024, Samoylova traveled the 2,300-mile Atlantic highway from her home state of Florida to Maine, capturing a nation grappling with change, loss, and endurance in her series titled "Atlantic Coast."
Route 1 stands uniquely among America's great highways, snaking from the cold Canadian border in Fort Kent, Maine to the sun-bleached terminus in Key West, Florida. The highway absorbed many smaller roads including the Kings Highway and Overseas Highway when the Joint Board of Interstate Highways officially merged them in the 1920s, creating one continuous Atlantic thoroughfare from numerous fragmented paths. Despite maintaining an illusion of continuity, Route 1 shifts constantly with light, seasons, and local character.
"Each place along it has its own rhythm, its own wounds and hopes," Samoylova explains. Unlike the neon-tinged iconography associated with Route 66, this eastern highway presents diverse landscapes ranging from Massachusetts's abandoned mill towns with shattered glass to South Carolina's sherbet-painted clapboard houses. "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," she observes.
Samoylova's project directly responds to Berenice Abbott's similar 1954 journey down Route 1, though Abbott began in northern Maine and traveled south. Abbott photographed daily life scenes including Ferris wheels, churches, fruit sellers, and parking meters, understanding that landscapes reflect their era's values and blind spots. One particularly striking Abbott photograph from Jacksonville, Florida shows three men at a segregated water fountain, with one man waiting and looking directly into the camera lens while two others drink.
"She didn't editorialize; she simply looked," Samoylova says of Abbott. "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." While Abbott captured post-war optimism and expansion, Samoylova organized her project to trace flows of risk rather than progress, beginning in Florida where climate change effects are immediate and visible.
Traveling in her comfortable old SUV, Samoylova made multiple fragmented trips through highway sections, with stays varying from single-day shoots to week-long explorations of local communities and lighting conditions. Route 1's proximity to water defined much of her experience, as many images show weathering and decay from wave-battered built environments. "Traveling the Atlantic coast taught me that America reveals itself most clearly along its edges," she notes. "What I found there was a mix of beauty and fragility, places constantly rebuilding while holding onto traces of what came before."
Certain visual patterns emerged throughout Samoylova's documentation, particularly reflections appearing in multiple forms - palm trees shining from vintage car hoods or crimson fireworks on dark bay surfaces. "Maybe because they carry a sense of uncertainty that feels so familiar now," she suggests. She found herself drawn to in-between spaces created by fences, scaffolding, and flood lines, which "started to feel like the country's pulse, symbols of how things are constantly being built, fixed, or fenced off."
Despite thousand-mile distances between regions, Samoylova discovered surprising similarities across states. "The underlying emotion felt similar," she explains. "A quiet determination to hold on to something familiar." While state borders didn't create sharp landscape or cultural shifts, she observed subtle changes traveling northward as landscapes became more enclosed by settlements and woodlands, and people seemed more reserved.
Regional identity expressed itself through distinct small gestures across different areas. "In Georgia, it might be through faith or community; in the Carolinas, through memory and preservation; in Maine, through self-reliance and distance," Samoylova notes. "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 both immigrant and American citizen informed her Atlantic Coast creation, allowing her to switch between observer and participant roles. Sometimes she felt like an outsider, particularly in places where past is performed as heritage, with nostalgia's thickness creating distance for the Russian-born photographer. However, she experienced equally many connection moments when Route 1 felt less like a government creation and more like 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 recalls. "These gestures reminded me that the country isn't an abstraction; it's made up of small, human continuities." Through her extensive documentation, Samoylova revealed Route 1 as more than a highway - it became a portrait of American resilience, adaptation, and the quiet determination to preserve familiar elements while facing constant change.
