Irina Rozovsky captures Brooklyn's Prospect Park in a romantic gentle
Irina Rozovsky's new photo book In Plain Air, edited by Mack, shows Prospect Park in Brooklyn in a wonderful way as a social center and place of calm.
The series grew out of a little revelation that Rozovsky had in 2010 while riding a motorboat on the lake south of the park. From the water she could see how the park had attracted so many friends, lovers, and communities. After that moment, she returned for the next ten years to photograph corners of the park and the people who frequented it.
All images by Irina Rozovsky from In Plain Air, published by Mack, 2021, courtesy of the artist and Mack
Rozovsky's portrait of Prospect Park is breezy romantic, partly due to the blow of the coronavirus pandemic, which altered the parameters of our relationship with nature and nearly brought to a halt the lighthearted social scenes scattered throughout her series. The title that Rozovsky – a French speaker – chose for the book is appropriately derived from the term en plein air, which means outside in French.
The romantic quality of the series is also based on its aesthetics and the process behind it. Her pallets are interspersed with weathered earth tones and dusty pinks reminiscent of Eugène Atget's photographs of early 20th century Paris, and while In Plain Air swaps Parisian bricks and concrete for a natural oasis in the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn, Rozovsky roams the park, to photograph these The scenes are similar to those of Atget, who was both a photographer and a flaneur.
Atget spearheaded an era of photographers fascinated by the old order of things in the face of the Haussmannian isation of Paris, in which existing structures and neighborhoods were cleared to make way for widened streets, grand buildings and, ironically, parks.
Against the backdrop of the ever-changing skyline of New York City and, in particular, the rampant gentrification of Brooklyn, Rozovsky's series frames Prospect Park as an important source of calm in the center of the district and its communities – a treasure that is only underscored by the beginning the pandemic.
In Plain Air by Irina Rozovsky is published by Mack; mackbooks.co.uk