Irina Rozovsky, Mark Steinmetz, Insieme, 2023

In 2021, Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz were invited to take part in two photographic projects in Italy, one in Castelfranco Veneto (the Veneto region) and the other in Lecce (Puglia). The subject intended to drive the work was ‘nature’; a word with so many variations of meaning in the context of today’s diversified, fragmented landscape, which constantly reflects our lives as well as condition the way that we observe reality.

This book compiles a selection of the artists’ photographs of these two Italian regions so far apart from one another. These are places where nature reveals itself through different forms of expression and where the relationship between body and space, captured in a combination of light and shade, seems to take on an inconsistent and sometimes absolute value.

Insieme (together) tells of a photographic experience in Italy that was composed in the form of an intimate, personal diary. With the artists’ dual gaze gently organizing a narrative structure, Rozovsky and Steinmetz’s photographs sit alongside one another, alternating and rotating in harmony with a discontinuous, fluctuating rhythm, just as in life’s episodes. These pictures, which seem almost poised to capture unexpected events and unusual encounters but especially moments of a shared daily life, express a singular familiarity with the places being found, conveying the natural character of their authenticity.