One morning in the summer of 2014, Irina Rozovsky woke up in a Serbian mountain
village to the sound of hundreds of trumpets as a brass band festival set up in
the hills. At once pleading and tragic, joyful and frenetic, the music set the
tone for what would become Rozovsky’s journey through the Balkan region,
including Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Croatia, Greece,
Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. Profoundly drawn to the land and its people,
Rozovsky created the intimate and equivocal photographs that form Mountain Black
Heart. Rozovsky’s borderless vision drifts through railways, farms, open water,
parking lots, fairgrounds, and graveyards, balancing vitality and life with
suggestions of dark history and subtle signs of violence. Interspersed
throughout are striking portraits of people and animals which emanate
vulnerability and resilience. Through its loose, expressionistic approach and a
compassionate engagement with the human and natural world, Rozovsky’s nomadic
project pieces together a personal and kaleidoscopic view of a fragmented place.
