Mountain Black Heart

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.