In Plain Air (2021), published by MACK, is Irina Rozovsky’s lyrical portrait of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and the people who inhabit it. The book begins with an encounter viewed from the park’s southern lake: from a small motorboat, Rozovsky observed families, lovers, and friends gathered along the tree-lined shore, their varied backgrounds sharing the same public ground and moment. That initial impression—part mirage, part social panorama—became the basis for a sustained photographic study.

Rozovsky’s colour photographs hold the park between two conditions. It is an escape from the noise of the surrounding city, yet never a retreat from social life. Trees, water, weather, and the changing seasons provide a shifting backdrop for encounters that are intimate, communal, playful, or quietly solitary. The landscape does not simply frame its visitors; it helps reveal the park as a democratic and nurturing space, where difference and proximity coexist in plain sight.

The book’s distinctive quality lies in this balance of lyricism and observation. Rather than treating Prospect Park as a picturesque refuge, Rozovsky attends to the complex reality produced when many lives briefly share one landscape. Her use of colour heightens the tension between the natural world and the city’s dense social fabric, while the concise 96-page format gives the work the character of a focused photographic statement. For collectors, In Plain Air merits attention as a carefully sustained account of public space: local in its setting, but expansive in its understanding of belonging, encounter, and the American melting pot.