The Balkans are very hard to describe. Though I have spent an inordinate amount of time in Greece, mostly in its capital, having traveled through the Balkans to get there, I remember a sense of something enigmatic, misty, and compelling as we traveled to and from Greece. I remember thinking about it all on a return stuck at the Serbian/Hungarian border for what seemed like an eternity, cars slowly inching forward, Orban’s deliberately difficult policy toward refugees causing innumerable delays and aggravations at checkpoints. Staying for a moment in Belgrade, I remember feeling that it was a world in which history felt explicitly jammed like ammunition in a chamber. On one hand, I had just passed the vestigial tail of a pro-Russian parade in the city as I was out shooting, and on the way out of town, we passed the Genex Towers, and I remember concrete bearing the marks of stray bullets from the 90s. I remember the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense building, a bombed-out husk, left to showcase wounds from the Allied NATO bombing of 1999, itself a reminder of the terrible atrocities of the Balkan Wars, something I would learn more about later through photographers such as Giles Peress, Robin Graubard, Nikos Economopoulos, Thomas Dworzak, and others.

When I learned about this stretch of Europe, I was taken aback. It felt so European, yet there was something slightly off-kilter in the air. It felt like a secret, or a promise. I could imagine all the horrors of lattes and chain malls eventually infiltrating Macedonia and Albania, being turned into a luxury waterfront, a theme that seems concurrent with attitudes in the present day. When I mentioned that it seemed like a secret, I could see so many possibilities for this place in Europe, but realized that opening up to the EU would also kill off what charm, however enigmatic it seemed, it held. Doubtless, if we do not blow ourselves up before long, we will see a transformation in Albania, Serbia, and perhaps the other countries.

When you read about Tito and his legacy, depending on the perspectives you encounter, you begin to understand the hardline regime, how it kept Yugoslavia intact for many years, but ultimately, how resilient its people have been over time. The complexity of its different identities presents a very coarse way to read its political situations, but one that does affect the various countries’ hostilities and camaraderie. To suggest that it takes an insider to understand these positions is not lost on me, particularly given the complexities and the discourses surrounding the upheaval of the 90s. Living in a former Soviet state, I can understand this to some extent, but I am careful not to assume that the Balkans can be symbolically linked to each of its parts.

For example, spending so much time in Greece, I came to the conclusion at some point about Greek identity, which often gets overshadowed by the diaspora effect of “we Greeks” when in reality, Greek identity is not as linked, despite what Christopher Nolan’s detractors may tell you, to its ancient past, though that is part of it. Instead, it is Balkan, a strange mix of Ottoman ancestry, European identity, and the Greek side of its nature. It has seen civil wars, been overrun by the CIA, been forced to be understood through its shipping history, and yet, like many countries, it has divisions in its provinces, islands, and broader areas that keep differences prominent. If you ask someone from Thessaloniki, or the Peloponeses, if they have much in common with Athens, of course, they will suggest the We Greek, but when you get into it, there are differences in each characteristic. If you take this example of Greece and magnify it x 1000, you might approximate the attitude of it within the framework of the Balkans, and yet, Greece itself rarely qualifies itself within that specific framework until you discuss Alexander the Great.

What strikes me as beautiful about the Balkans, from what little I have seen, is its sense of authenticity, something that is increasingly rare and diminishing in return. Perhaps this comes with a cost of non-participation, of wars almost starting over license plates and driving accidently ont he wrong trail, but ultimately, one gathers a sense of vitality, the essence of limited participation in a world spinning further out of control, a sense of being glued to the past, yet being able to recognize the flaws of the so-called future just outside one’s door. This authenticity is tied to the land, to the neighbors and enemies, and to the knowledge that a conflagration could easily begin just outside, on the road out of town, erupting into uncertainty and morbid prognostication. Or, it could usher in a new era of creature comforts, technology, data centers, and circumvented habit, a removal from what is known for what is promised as new and progressive. It is very hard to discuss what the Balkans will face in the coming years, but change is likely inevitable.

Irina Rozovsky’s Black Mountain Heart (MACK, 2026) examines the Balkans through two sets of eyes, though one set is inevitably American, the country where she lives. The other set of eyes is her background as a European, a Russian in fact. Though that was an early part of her life, it is an interesting question: how might her encounters have been facilitated, given the geography of her interests and her former country’s historically influential role in the region? In this, I am not positing a type of Euro-Gaze or Ameri-gaze, but thinking about how her wealth of lived experience has likely drawn her to this place rather than to a country like France, where she also spends a significant amount of time. I am curious how she relates to the 20th Century of our shared youth and how that influences this project filled with its chromophilic and flash tendencies, a Black Mountain sobriquet to nights passing into haloed days.

When I look at the book, I remember Dutch legend Bertien Van Manen’s A Hundred Summers, A Hundred Winters (1994), as well as East Wind, West Wind (2001). I am reminded of Van Manen when I think of Rozovsky’s color and her interest in portraiture, particularly the scarce indoor views found in the book. Something about the work speaks to a documentary practice, but it is not locked into the conditions or rules for which answers must be supplied. Instead, there is a stylization that borders on documentary tendency, but dissipates in the aggregate flow of images, in which not every image must give way to a potential narrative or “recording”. Rozovsky’s use of saturated color and flash also destabilizes any need to see this work in strictly genre terms.

What I might mention is that it is a significant departure from In Plain Air (MACK, 2021) in that, whereas both books share geography as a strategy, In Plain Air worked a much smaller patch of Prospect Park in New York, and the color was graded with type of halcyon sepia that gave the impression of cinema, a filmic potential that is not, by proxy found in the new book, which depending on what you find interesting in Irina’s work speaks to her flexibility as an artist working in color photography. I find both strategies equally engaging, but I read them slightly differently, with Mountain Black Heart arguably showing her versatility more than In Plain Air, in which everything congeals through the use of color grading and the uniformity of place. No doubt, this project feels slightly more serious in scope, and that is not to diminish from In Plain Air, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but here, there is a slightly more robust quality to the project and it feels, also by proxy of travel and movement to be the slightly more significant of the two and does indeed step into the realm of artists like Van Manen, mature and fully exhibiting what Rozovsky is capable of.