Mountain Black Heart began with an encounter: in the summer of 2014, Irina Rozovsky awoke in a Serbian mountain village to hundreds of trumpets sounding as a brass-band festival took shape in the hills. That charged mixture of pleading, grief, exhilaration, and disorder becomes the book’s emotional key. Published by MACK in 2026, the volume gathers Rozovsky’s photographs from a journey through Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Croatia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania.

Rather than offering a settled portrait of the Balkans, Rozovsky works through movement, proximity, and uncertainty. Railways, farms, open water, parking lots, fairgrounds, and graveyards form a loose geography in which the boundaries between the personal, the social, and the historical remain deliberately permeable. Her expressionistic sequence moves between vitality and foreboding, allowing indications of dark history and quiet violence to surface without reducing the region to a single narrative.

Portraits of people and animals punctuate this wandering structure. They are intimate without becoming explanatory, carrying both vulnerability and resilience. The resulting book is less a document of place than a personal, kaleidoscopic construction—an account shaped by sustained attention to human and natural life, and by an awareness of a landscape marked by fragmentation.

For collectors, Mountain Black Heart merits attention as a fully articulated photographic project whose strength lies in its equivocal mood and open structure. Its significance is not simply geographic: Rozovsky’s borderless vision makes the act of looking itself the subject, connecting disparate sites and lives through rhythm, recurrence, and emotional association. The 132-page hardcover presents a substantial statement of this nomadic body of work.