In 2021, Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz were invited to make photographs in two Italian regions: the Veneto, around Castelfranco Veneto, and Puglia, around Lecce. The ostensible subject was nature, a word the book treats as unstable, its meanings shifting with the fragmented landscapes and daily life it reflects and conditions. Insieme gathers a selection of the resulting pictures, made in places far apart from one another yet brought into conversation.
The book is built on the dialogue between two photographers rather than a single authorial voice. Their images sit alongside one another, alternating and rotating in a rhythm that the publisher describes as discontinuous and fluctuating, closer to the uneven unfolding of lived episodes than to a thesis. What emerges is an intimate, diaristic record of a shared experience in Italy, in which moments of daily life, unexpected events, and unusual encounters acquire a singular familiarity. The relationship between body and space, rendered in combinations of light and shade, takes on an inconsistent and sometimes absolute value. Across these pages, nature appears in different forms of expression, and the photographs convey the natural character of authenticity.
Rozovsky, born in Moscow in 1981, studied at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is known for transforming external landscapes into interior states; she and Steinmetz run the photography workshop space The Humid in Athens, Georgia. Steinmetz, born in New York in 1961 and a Yale graduate, works mainly in series and has photographed subjects ranging from children and teenagers in the American Southeast to the streets of Paris and Italian towns. Their shared project is edited by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, Stefania Rössl, and Massimo Sordi, with a text by Rössl and design by Damiano Fraccaro of Otium.
The book is a section-sewn, silkscreened hardcover of 96 pages and 61 plates, measuring 21 by 16.8 centimeters and published in English, French, and Italian by Chose Commune in co-publication with OMNE. For collectors attentive to the photobook as a collaborative form, Insieme offers a sustained two-voice structure in which sequencing and design carry as much weight as any individual frame, and in which the idea of nature is tested against specific, distanced places.
