Insieme (the Italian word for ‘together’) is a book by two authors: Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz. The lives of these two distinct artistic voices are entwined together in numerous ways; as partners, as founders of The Humid—a space for photography workshops in Athens, Georgia—and as parents. In fact, there is a third presence hovering in and around the photographs contained in this book; their young daughter Amelia whose handwriting graces its cover, rendering the title several times over in a sunflower yellow.
The book is the photographic conclusion of a period of time spent together in Italy. In 2021, the photographers were commissioned to make two projects there, one in Castelfranco Veneto and the other in Lecce. The theme given to them was ‘nature,’ a common thread to explore the two vastly different regions of Veneto and Puglia.
A motif as broad as it is complicated in today’s world, Insieme doesn’t explicitly focus on ‘nature’ nor tend to the specifics of each area. A summer month spent in these destinations and the boundaries of the two locations and theme seemed to melt away, transfiguring into something else: a personal diary of what it is to plant oneself (or selves) in different places, of time spent outside, of bodies in space, of the magic of discovery.
Exploring place has always played a key role in the practices—and lives—of both photographers, from their relationship to their local environs to the act of negotiating the fine line between proximity and distance when working further afield. Born in Russia and now based in the US, Rozovsky has made projects across the world, from a variety of post-Soviet countries to Cuba, Israel and the different corners of America that she has found herself in including New York City. Steinmetz was born in NYC, and has moved within the US becoming known for his photographic interactions with LA and the South, as well as work made in Berlin, Paris and Italy.
Through different means, their pictures challenge the idea of being ‘rooted’ in one place as well as the notion of being an ‘outsider’ when we leave the place we call home. “For me, photography has always helped me understand and depict this feeling I carry of being an eternal tourist in life,” Rozovsky comments. “I feel most alive and see most intently when I am in a place for the first time and sort of sneak in under its fold. It is so exciting when the preconceptions I bring along collide with the realities I observe and a fuller picture of place and its experience takes shape.”
For both artists, photography seems to be a way of being in relation to the world, of cultivating familiarity and connection. When Steinmetz moves, he brings his sensibilities with him like a compass, relishing the challenge of applying his black and white photographic language to different places. “I like to explore other places and in general think traveling helps to broaden one’s perspective. But Italy is different (France too for me) as I feel perfectly at home,” says Steinmetz. “They are not really ‘other’ places.”
This time, under the expansive horizon of movement they both know well, Steinmetz and Rozovsky found themselves sharing the same space. Darting between their two distinct styles—Rozovsky shooting in color, Steinmetz in black and white—the book is more dance than dialogue where we can almost feel the photographers sidestepping each other to explore the scenes unfolding in front of them. The specific beauty of Insieme lies in the physical proximity of the two sets of eyes, often falling on the same thing at different moments or from an alternative perspective. Its sequence bears the quality of movement and rhythm too; the images less talking to each other, more flowing from one to the next.
The journey we are taken on has an enchanting quality as we follow the photographers on their daily path of exploration. Variations on the theme of nature pop up throughout the book, some ephemeral like the gust of wind blowing a bright red towel mid-frame or the glowing monochrome pools of light stretching down empty streets. Some more tangible, conjuring the photographers’ diverging interests. For Steinmetz, a longstanding curiosity about how the “natural world tries to survive in a hostile urban setting” informs his pull towards the non-human. “How do the plants and animals make their way?” he asks, his images answering in the swaying trees that line the motorway or the languid body of a cat stretching out in the shadows of a street.
For Rozovsky, the experience of carrying a child—“the most ‘natural’ thing that is also as strange as science fiction”—led to a sensitivity to life’s cycles, present in the fruit and flowers frozen in different states of decay. The remnants of a pomegranate rots in the sun, crisp lemons multiply in the mirrors of a grocery shop. “I’m interested in how these things can represent the trajectory of the female body as life-giving—from virginal, forbidden, ripe, and slowly rotting,” she explains. “In Italy, women seemed so powerful to me, really aware and inhabiting their bodies in a great way.” Accompanied by the wind whistling through the book, suspending brooms in mid-air and breezing through hair, their power becomes almost metaphysical. “Witchiness?” Rozovsky muses.
The most recurring presence in Insieme, though, is little Amelia who wanders through her parents’ images, sometimes appearing in color, sometimes in black and white, like the protagonist of this adventure. “Her hand or shoulder or back of her head are in so many of my frames, she’s always on the edge of my gaze. I resist photographing her directly,” Rozovsky says. “For Mark, she is often the subject and muse. It was intense and wonderful.” One picture towards the end of the book shows her outstretched in the back of a car, eyes closed in reverie, perhaps resting after a day out exploring.
Insieme closes with an essay that summons the spirit of another chronicler of the Italian landscape, Luigi Ghirri, here quoted describing photography as a “huge magic toy that succeeds in linking the large and the small, illusions and reality, time and space, our awareness as adults and the fairy-tale world of our childhood.” The spell that Rozovsky and Steinmetz cast with their images—pictures that double up, rhyme, reflect each other, full of strange shapes, classical relics and colors—feels imbibed with exactly this allure of discovery.
Insieme
by Irina Rozovsky & Mark Steinmetz
Publisher: Chose Commune
ISBN: 979-10-96383-39-9