{A photograph} that dramatizes the ability of nature
When the photographer Irina Rozovsky moved from Boston to Athens, Georgia, she started taking walks round her new neighborhood. She’d push her daughter’s stroller to a close-by wooded path, making an attempt to get the infant to sleep, and {photograph} what she may alongside the way in which. In the future in 2018, after a storm, the trail was flooded. A younger woman stood within the vibrant solar on the fringe of the murky water, observing the unusual new scene earlier than her—“confronting the unbelievable,” as Rozovsky places it. The picture reminded Rozovsky of the fairy-tale trope of a kid getting misplaced within the forest. “It’s each a romance and a nightmare,” she instructed me.
Rozovsky’s untitled {photograph} might be on show this fall on the Excessive Museum of Artwork in Atlanta, as a part of the exhibition “A Lengthy Arc: Images and the American South Since 1845.” In an introduction to an accompanying e-book, the Atlantic contributing author Imani Perry displays on the Twenty first-century photographers who seize the area’s distinctive landscapes with compositions that evoke a Nineteenth-century sense of the chic. Within the South, Perry writes, “nature takes over all the pieces that people create and destroy.”
Rozovsky insists that the work shouldn’t be making an environmental assertion. As a mom, she worries in regards to the position that people have performed in warming the world her daughter will inherit. However as a photographer, she instructed me, she was drawn to this specific scene for its “serene and surreal” magnificence, its unsettling scale.
A relative newcomer to the South, Rozovsky has been struck by the excessive drama of its nature. “It may be so wild,” she stated, even simply down the road in Athens. She’s not non secular—however when timber fall, or a path floods like this, Rozovsky stated, it could really feel nearly biblical. “There’s one thing bigger than us.”
This text seems within the October 2023 print version with the headline “Confronting the Unbelievable.” Whenever you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.