Photographer Irina Rozovsky Captures the Sights and Sounds of Prospect Park in New Book

Since the start of the pandemic, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s description of Prospect Park as an escape from the “cramped, confined and controlling circumstances of the streets” has never felt more vital. For many people over the past year and a half who were pushed into the park because of their desire for open space amidst a lockdown, escape was the only option. Joining others as something closer to inhabitants than visitors, they experienced the multivarious charms of the park for the first time.

The photographer Irina Rozovsky captures some of the same spirit in her new book, “In Plain Air,” published by MACK. Shot between 2011 and 2020, the photos were all taken in Prospect Park, tracing the activity of its many visitors across different seasons. They have the glow of a lazy afternoon, of people going through their daily routines: a woman playing a violin alone; two men practicing Tai chi; kids building a snowman. Some appear posed, others candid. People embrace on blankets at Long Meadow. Occasionally, a swan from Prospect Park Lake makes an appearance. What you notice immediately is the diversity at hand. Residents from all corners of the borough put every square inch of the park to use. “It is a melting pot bubbling over in all its glory,” Rozovsky writes in the book.

But at the end of the day, everybody goes home. Rozovsky, whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, among other publications, and has work in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is ultimately moved by the park’s transitory nature. “I come back again and again to realize that the people moving through the park are here one minute, gone the next,” she writes. “They come for an afternoon, to sit, to stroll, but when they leave, the park remains.”

[Photos by Irina Rozovsky from “In Plain Air,” MACK, 2021. Courtesy the artist and MACK.]

Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of Brownstoner magazine.

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