Irina Rozovsky (b. 1981, Moscow) studied French and Spanish literature as an undergraduate at Tufts University and received an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art in 2007. Her work has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions and publications, including: 25 under 25: Up and Coming American Photographers, powerHouse Books and Duke University; 31 Women in Art Photography, curated by Charlotte Cotton and Jon Feinstein; Exposure at the PRC, curated by Mia Hamm; the Magnum Expression Award juried by Martin Parr; Humble Arts Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography; Rencontres, Arles; PhotoEspaña, Madrid. Most recently, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the New England School of Photography, Boston. This spring she published her first monograph One to Nothing (Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg). Irina lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at Parsons the New School for Design and the International Center of Photography.
fototazo: It’s been said that The Americans is an example of a body of work that could only have been made by an outsider, someone who could look at the United States with the distance necessary to see the country clearly. This is something that has been said several times in reviews of One to Nothing about you and your perspective on Israel.
The counter-argument to this line of thinking has always been that an artist should focus on whom and what they know best – themselves, their world, their community – in order to speak about the world beyond themselves. What do you think of these arguments - that now extend to your work - and what gives you the motivation to make work as well as the faith in making work about the world outside your own?
Irina Rozovsky: I never know where my own world ends and the outside world begins. Since I came here as a kid and had to learn to adapt, I've held onto this idea that I could dissolve into any context and kind of belong, at least temporarily. The camera let's me in close, yet permits a skeptical distance. My immediate world is small and there is so much I want to see beyond it. This wanting allows pictures to happen.
One to Nothing has images that were made out of pure curiosity, surprise, and awe that you can only feel when you're confronting something for the first time. Thank you for the Robert Frank analogy, I'll take that anytime, but I never really felt like an outsider. The inside / outside point of view is a complicated thing — I actually believe you can be closer to something you don’t know, that is not yours. So at the same time I was a tourist in Israel, I had a very strong sense that I was home in a big way. It sounds new-agey, but it was like suddenly tapping into a living, breathing human history and realizing you are part of it, not just an individual molecule floating in space.
f: In comments on your work, reviews have also frequently talked about how you show the "other side" of Israel and have stayed away from a direct encounter with the traditional storylines and themes that dominate the news and that form the common impression of the country.
How much are your images a conscious - however oblique - look at the dominant themes commonly connected to Israel such as the role of religion in shaping the territory, settlements, Palestinian-Israeli dynamics, violence, and the army, and how much are these themes inevitable because of the work having been made in Israel? Or would you disagree that these themes exist in the work? In short - how consciously are you addressing issues in contemporary Israel?
IR: I think no matter what kind of art you make in Israel, it will always be read for a political message. It's in the air and comes with the territory. Oblique is the perfect word here because One to Nothing is apolitical, I'd say — more concerned about the effects and absurdity of conflict, rather than its details. This book wouldn't make for an informative news report, but it intends to convey in a subliminal way this land’s complexity, riddled by never ending tug-of-war face-offs. There is no knowing the facts in Israel. Whatever you hear is coming from one side or the other. I'm curious about neutrality, an empathetic distance.
f: In one of the book's two essays Jon Feinstein says that you sought to explore the territory with an "uninhibited whimsy." Looking at your work, however, it seems too consistent, too carefully considered, too conscious of a deeper content to be called whimsical. How would you connect how he describes how you approached making the work and how the images read?
IR: I didn't really go with the idea to take pictures, it was a surprise. I fell into this project but when I landed, my feelers went up and I realized this was very important. The pictures came very quickly, almost violently fast. I made two years worth of pictures in two weeks. I think that's what Jon has picked up on—that there is an instinctual thinking going on rather than an analytical one in the images themselves. Coming to terms with what I'd gathered took longer. The edit for the book was endless in comparison. But even in the sequence and edit it was important to hold onto a sort of whimsy, to avoid obvious combinations and overt statements. The “whimsical” Jon addresses, I think, is a beating-around-the-bush that might be present in this project.
f: We are almost never allowed to connect with the people in the book– eyes are closed, averted, or covered; people face away from us. Talk about your relationship to your subjects, why you keep the observer at a distance from them, and how that helps you to develop the themes in your work.
