Rozovsky: What became very interesting to me was an extended look, drilling into the singular spirit of a location. I never intended to set out in search of the war-torn or political. But due to the settings of my inner lens, and maybe the circumstances of my past, I have felt particularly alive in places where despite the cruelty of war, institutional oppression, and threatened social and religious freedoms, the flame of humanity refuses to be stamped out.

As we see now in the US, people under pressure have a clearer sense of who they are and what they stand for, and I’m interested in detecting that in the fabric of the day-to-day. So I would say that it’s a vitality despite all odds that ignited me photographically in these places. That, and an uncanny sense of familiarity and connection—I show up as an outsider but soon, in a strange, chameleon kind of way start to feel that I belong, and have belonged for generations.

Rozovsky: The practical approach is always the same and looks like a hummingbird dance where I’m hovering around what’s interesting in a skittish, excited, zigzagging way. I usually want to move, in a rental car, a bus, a train going from town to town, hopping out often, some initial locations on my radar that I never get to but stumble on something better in the process.

I often start in the city and work my way to the countryside or towards a body of water, then back to the city again. But it all takes shape in real time and the route, drawn out on a map afterward, would be like irrational cat scratches.

In Russia I was wading through a private daydream, grasping for recognition, trying to connect what I remembered with the physicality of things before me. I found that memory works in inexplicable ways, in another sense we know little about. In Israel, time and memory took on an infinitely more complex dimension, my family’s modern story just a tiny strand in the colossal Gordian knot of the wandering Jew.

I have been accused of not taking a stronger position with my Israeli photographs, or picking a side, but my claim is that the work is inescapably political. The cover image is a symbol of the nature of conflict and a choice to remain neutral in choosing a side is indeed the position. Through these two projects, I located my approach towards place – involved but withdrawn, a hermit-like journalist (by the way did you know a Hermit is a type of hummingbird?), weaving a tapestry from personal and universal threads.

Rozovsky: My first few projects were like tsunamis. I felt I had to cast a wide net, grab everything all at once at a frenzied speed. In Plain Air, the Prospect Park project, even though it covers a tiny geographic space in comparison to Israel and Cuba, is slow, ongoing, tracing the seasons, the transformations in the landscape—a cultivating process. And my pictures in Mountain Black Heart are a combination—I am working quickly but want to continue returning to dig deeper.

I am covering a large, complex region that isn’t really on the photographic map. We’ve all seen Russia, Israel, and Cuba, in the movies, on the news, in coffee table books. But there is no photographic cliché to push against in the former Yugoslavia. This has allowed me to be more unhinged and less realistic in the image making, more free form.

I think each project rubs off on and prepares me for the next. It’s a germinating process where an accidental photograph made in one place is a dormant seed that blossoms somewhere later on. But in the process of shooting, the body of work is only a vague notion somewhere in the very back of my mind and I’m mostly dealing with the photo in front of me.

Rozovsky: Yes, I do. More than the life that followed, it’s immigration that certainly gave me the eyes through which I see. I came to the US when I was seven and soon felt desperate to brush the Coming to America story under the carpet and camouflage into the New England suburb, yearning to be like any regular American kid. The more banal and average, the better.

But with age, I became fascinated by my parents’ retelling of their youth in Moscow and the time capsule effect—as if that city, that place still held their experiences. And yet, sadly, far removed in space and time from both their current lives here and the Moscow of today, the memories float rootless.

I wondered about the immigrant’s illusory vision of the past, the reshaping or loss of culture, the painful desire to adapt to a new country, and the gnawing feeling of displacement. And while there is so much joy and luck in ending up in America (perhaps a former, kinder America), there is also loss and longing for what you’ve left behind.

Rozovsky: The organic swiftness of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images is what helped me fall in love with photography. But it has always been books and stories that brought me out of my world into a bigger one and in turn influenced my work—Chekov, Nabokov, Cortazar, Salinger, Bashevis Singer.

Lately, my world has become insular and my mind’s distracted. But when something gets through it hits hard and luckily I live with my favorite photographer, so I can always feast my eyes. Recently, however, paintings have touched me deepest, amongst them, Richard Gerstl, James Ensor, Egon Schiele’s The Family, and flooring me completely was Raphael’s Madonna and Child that I saw at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

Rozovsky: Thank you! Yes, it absolutely turned it upside down and inside out. I am writing this right now with one constant eye on our 10-month daughter who plays by my side and with a single smile makes me forget myself and everything about the world outside.

Feinstein: Your editor and assistant!

Rozovsky: Having a child is an indescribable and astounding change and there is no way to prepare for it or be in control. At the moment, my practice is in shambles, but it’s a good challenge and I’m finding ways to continue photographing, in short spurts on my own or together with Amelia, the stroller as a tripod.

What’s most shattering is how caring for and loving madly this helpless human stirs up a storm of emotions that redefine how you relate to the world and other people. It puts things in their place, helps you tap into the mysterious cycle of life and death and the reason behind most things, while other things stop making sense entirely, like the passage of time, cruelty, violence. These life forces and animal instincts are something I’d like to put in photographs.