Irina Rozovsky’s Impressionistic Photos Weaving Through the Balkans

The photographer’s latest book condenses more than a decade of journeys throughout the region into a fluid exploration of “light and darkness”

Mountain Black Heart, Irina Rozovsky’s new photo book, is both about the Balkans and not about the Balkans. Its images – a rush of obscure, artificially lit nighttimes that clash with bright, airy daytime scenes of subjects in repose – wind through the region, but it does not capture a linear journey tied up in a neat narrative bow. Instead, Rozovsky trades in ambiguity and atmosphere, making a body of work that feels as much impressionistic as expressionistic. Throughout, she returns to one question: “How can you photograph a place but not really be concerned with the facts?” 

The seeds were planted during a visit to Zagreb and a subsequent encounter with a brass band festival in rural Serbia, both of which piqued the US-based photographer’s curiosity. She has returned to the Balkan region on and off for more than ten years, from northernmost Croatia to southern Greece. A stack of signposts photographed from behind, pointing exactly nowhere, allude to the unknown. “The blurring for me is really important,” she says of her choice not to distinguish each geographic location. It’s not an insignificant decision given the many tensions over borders and national identities in the region, but this was personal preference, too. “It was very loose. I wanted to cast a wide net over the region – I wasn’t checking any boxes,” she says. 

She was guided by a “stray dog feeling”, echoing Daidō Moriyama’s famous self-characterisation as a roving photographer on the fringes, which is perhaps why she was inclined to photograph “lonely people and creatures”. Much of the work was shot in isolated settings – misty villages, rugged roadsides, vast, mountain-edged lakes – untethered from the rush and conformity of urban life. “I’m always drawn to outside the city,” she says. She went in search of landscapes that had “this DNA or a human history that’s part of it. Like a landscape could have a feeling itself; it could experience a feeling of what the past might be or what the current moment is.” 

Yet Mountain Black Heart is not a book of landscapes. The people she encountered over ten years and thousands of miles are the lifeblood of the project. Many of the people appear statuesque: the monumental figure of a burly woodcutter thrusting an axe in the air; a woman wrapped in a blanket, leaving only her head and neck visible like a noble bust; a child poised in absolute stillness as snakes coil around him resembles a sculpture of a mythic deity. This effect is as much about texture as it is about composition. Skin often takes on a porcelain quality, seeming solid yet smooth to the touch. Though she hadn’t set out to create portraits in this way, she recognises in them something “sedentary”, as though “rooted to the ground”, she says. “I hadn’t thought about this, but it’s stoic … It’s a sign of permanence or strength.”

This stasis is confronted by many moments of disorientation within the images. Bodies are flung upside down or suspended mid-air; awkward perspectives of spaces leave viewers on uncertain ground. That distortion also appears in the artefacts, lens burn, double exposure and other photographic and processing glitches left intact. Sometimes Rozovsky’s palette warps into searing whites and unnatural blues, rusts and violets, the lighting aggressive in front of her close-range flash. “I have a book I made in Cuba that came out a few years before this – I think it’s this particular [Fuji medium-format] camera that I’m really drawn to – and I dipped into that mode again here, where there’s flash and the image can have more of a cruelty to it. It’s less romantic,” she says.

These features are also a byproduct of her after-dark tendencies. “I didn’t keep regular hours, and the nighttime, I mean, it’s silly, but it’s so rich. It’s so mysterious, and nobody sees you,” she says. “In my mind, darkness really relates to violence and doubt and fear. But also it has these moments of beauty that saturate it or overpower the fear.”

Those references, “to violence and doubt and fear”, speak to the project’s undertow of conflict. It began several years into the Syrian Civil War, driving a refugee crisis that flowed through the Balkan region on a path heading west; Rozovsky visited refugee camps during her visits. It also gestures at the recent history of devastation within the region itself. “In Sarajevo you see a lot of bullet holes, and there were genocides and massacres everywhere you go,” she says. “But the last thing I want to do is show a bullet hole because it points to things we already know … It’s like Eggleston said: I’m at war with the obvious.”

Mountain Black Heart avoids slipping into predictable emotional registers, instead leaning into complexity. “There are really two sides of this coin that have to go hand in hand. This is a place of light and darkness,” she says. “It’s imprinted in the music from the region. It’s like a funeral march, but it also has this flip side of being almost manically joyful.” She points out that “the book ends in this cacophony of life”, reframing that earlier disorientation as a kinetic force. “It starts cold and dark, and then there’s a moment of winter, and I wanted it to feel warm at the end. Warm and explosive.” The light floods in, the frame opens up, the colours remain potent but they’re suddenly pushed into the realms of the organic. These shifts challenge the notion of a single narrative truth. “Photography is so easy to emphasise what we think we know, but for me, it’s just a way to question it, to experience the other side of the truth or knowing.”

Mountain Black Heart by Irina Rozovsky is published by Mack and out now.