“The interests were formed pretty early on in me, and my photography is really sort of a documentation of my process of thinking about images,” she says. “When you go out and see this vast landscape and you take a picture of that, you really shrink it down into something two dimensional and small … I’m trying to sort of bring them back to life, and print them out and rebuild them and create this environment again.”

There are distinct philosophical underpinnings driving these images, dealing formal ideas of the sublime — the transcendent sense of awe that a dramatic landscape seems to evoke and which informs our notions of beauty itself. Depending on the thinker you vibe with — Kant, Plato, Schopenhauer — the sublime can be the result of pure aesthetic beauty in form, line, and color, or it can represent something else, a more subtle phenomenon that isn’t about whether something is pretty or not but whether it stirs the witness internally.

Samoylova strikes a visual balance of these ideas, interpreting our sense for the sublime as the reason these “throwaway” and cliche landscapes still proliferate, then abstracting and exploding them to reveal new perspectives. “The images that are being produced with little digital cameras, with phones, might as well be illustrations in Kant’s books,” she says.