Irina Rozovsky

About Episode 68

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Irina Rozovsky talk about her gradual realization that photography was going to be her life’s work. They discuss how Irina’s process has changed since becoming a partner and mother, and relocating to the South. They also discuss The Humid, “An educational space committed to the practice of rigorous and ambitious photography”, that Irina started with her husband, Photographer Mark Steinmetz. Irina’s work is included in, A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia where this episode was recorded.

About Irina Rozovsky

Irina Rozovsky (born 1981, Moscow), makes photographs of people and places, transforming external landscapes into interior states. She has published three monographs: One to Nothing (Kehrer, 2011), Island in my Mind (Verlag Kettler, 2015), and In Plain Air (MACK, 2021). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Irina lives and works in Athens, Georgia where she and her husband Mark Steinmetz run the photography project space The Humid.

Which book that you have been involved with is a meaningful one you continue to revisit?

“I love them all equally. Each one is a rung in the ladder of my development, each one led to the next. But perhaps most monumental for me was my first book One to Nothing (2011), photographed on two trips across Israel. It is particularly meaningful and painful to look at now, as another war unfolds there, as more people die, as the world divides from rage and fear. I was just a kid when I made that work but I did it with urgency, hunger, and some skepticism. Each of the photos in that book holds an echo of the Cain and Abel story.”

Is there an image by another photographer that has influenced you in your career?

“When I saw this image by Mark Steinmetz from his book South Central, it seemed to me like the truest masterpiece. I wondered how a photograph could pack the punch of a Goya painting–how reality could be seen so soberly and so lyrically at the same time? I had to go down to Athens, GA to meet him and find out and have been getting to know him since then, still marveling at this life with photography.”