“You never find treasure on a mowed lawn,” Mark Steinmetz once remarked, describing his attraction to dog-eared, slightly peripheral American places, often in the South. Before his lens, everyday moments are frozen with a dollop of stylized romance and melancholy worthy of 1960s French cinema. Irina Rozovsky, too, seeks out moments of quiet contemplation—parkgoers in Brooklyn basking in magic-hour light, still lifes from the Balkans. She has also experimented with presentation, displaying her photographs in intimately scaled decorative frames purchased from eBay. Steinmetz and Rozovsky are partners in life—with a young daughter, Amelia—and they are partners running The Humid, a photography project in Athens, Georgia, offering workshops, lectures, and traditional analog training. Here, they talk with Michael Famighetti, Aperture’s editor in chief, about alternative approaches to teaching the craft of photography, the physical labor of making pictures, and the rewards of close attention, both out in the world and inside the darkroom.
