Irina Rozovsky (born in the USSR and raised in the US) has been published and exhibited internationally. She photographs people and places, transforming external landscapes into interior states. The work featured here is from her second monograph Island in my Mind, winner of the Kassel Fotobook Festival Dummy Award and published by Kettler Verlag in 2015. Irina is assistant professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.
I first came to Havana in July when it was impossibly hot and even the sea was sweating. To catch my breath, I’d lean against the wrinkled walls of tired buildings and leave on each a dripping imprint. The heat was ruthless.
It caused electrical outages and in the evenings the city slipped into thick blackness. This troubled only the gringo visitors—everyone else could see in the dark. They sat abuzz on the boardwalk cradling bottles of rum and throwing the empties to the waves that crashed on the rocks below. “It’s called dogs’ teeth†Bonco told me—those glass shards among the rocks when you’re swimming the next morning that scratch and make your feet bleed. But the boys and young guys hurl themselves into the water anyway, always diving like it’s the last time.
I thought of this underwater belt of barbed glass tight around the island, growing sharper with each night's party—all those bottles flickering through the hot night air like firecracker signals that do not reach other shores. Then the next morning those boys who laugh and dive, and kick up for air with feet that have the tough soles of old men.
