Irina Rozovsky first travelled to Croatia in 2014 after being invited to serve on the jury of a photography festival. From the beginning, she felt an unexpected sense of familiarity. The landscape, the traces of a shared socialist past and the atmosphere of the region seemed both foreign and strangely recognisable, prompting her to return and travel more extensively through the Balkans.

Over time, those journeys became Mountain Black Heart, an ongoing photographic exploration of the former Yugoslavia and neighbouring countries. Rozovsky travelled through Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Croatia, as well as Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, moving without a rigid itinerary and allowing encounters to shape the direction of the work.

What drew her back was not only the landscape or the complex history of the region, but the people she met along the way. She was fascinated by their humour, openness and ability to continue living with vitality in places that had undergone profound political and social upheaval. For Rozovsky, the photographs began to reveal two things at once: the harshness left by conflict and a heightened sense of humanity that seemed to have survived it. That closeness is particularly visible in her portraits. Rozovsky often photographs people she has only just met, yet the images rarely feel distant or formal. She has spoken about how differently people responded to the camera in the Balkans compared with the United States. Rather than becoming suspicious or self conscious, many of the people she encountered were comfortable being photographed or simply treated the presence of the camera as something unremarkable. This sense of trust allows the work to move easily between landscape, portraiture and fleeting moments of everyday life. Railways, farms, beaches, parking lots, fairgrounds and cemeteries appear alongside children, strangers and animals. Light and colour play an important role, not as decorative elements but as a way of creating atmosphere and drawing attention to small gestures and unexpected relationships.

Throughout the series, Rozovsky is attentive to contradictions. Tenderness exists beside violence, humour beside grief, beauty beside damage. The region’s history remains present, but she rarely addresses it directly. Instead, its traces emerge through gestures, landscapes and the ordinary persistence of daily life.

Her own history of migration inevitably informs this way of looking. Born in Moscow and raised in the United States, Rozovsky has often returned in her work to questions of displacement, belonging and the search for familiarity in places that are not entirely one’s own. In the Balkans, those questions found a particularly powerful setting. Rather than offering a definitive portrait of the former Yugoslavia, Mountain Black Heart develops through fragments and encounters. The photographs form something between documentary observation and a personal visual diary, creating an intimate and shifting portrait of a region whose histories, cultures and identities resist being reduced to a single narrative.