A View from Alessandra Sanguinetti’s Beautiful Heart and Soul
Belinda and Guille
When we started knocking around the idea of choosing the theme “Duende” for Volume 2 of DDRC, the first artist I thought of was Alessandra Sanguinetti. She is one of my favorite photographers, and the books she has made in the last 20 years are some of my favorite and most treasured photo books. For me, she is one of those photographers whose images kind of boggle my mind as to how she made them, how she happened to be lucky enough (it is not luck at all!) to have been in that position at that moment when that happened. If you spend some time with her work via the various links here, I think you will understand what I mean. Her photographs are beautiful, often made on film in square format, with luscious colors and an almost storybook, fantastical feel about them right out of the camera, even though they are documentary photos. I first learned of her work when a friend encouraged me to check out the images from her series “On the Sixth Day” about the relationship between people and animals on a rural Argentinian farm. Some of the photos unflinchingly bear witness to some of the animals’ gruesome ends and for a bleeding heart animal lover (me) they are kind of painful…but they are also beautiful, and because I believe Alessandra is also a bleeding heart animal lover, these animals often retain a certain dignity, even in death, due to her reverence. Her series about the wonderful cousins Belinda and Guille, who are from a neighboring farm, evolved naturally and beautifully out of the Sixth Day project and is a funny, poignant document of their relationship with each other and the land around them.
I love the way she sees.
I know that Alessandra is very busy and travels a lot, so I kind of felt like it would be a long shot to expect her to opt in and contribute to our project, but what did we have to lose in asking? I did ask and to my utter delight, she said yes and jumped right in! She also shared a series of paintings she made in 2019 with us, and there were so many and they were so funny and delightful that we decided to make them into a separate DDRC zine in collaboration with Alessandra. You will find out more about that a little later!
Alessandra, thank you for sharing your time and your work with us, we are very grateful! Your work, in my humble opinion, has the complicated and magical essence of your heart and soul poured into it, but you do this with the rare ability to bypass the obvious and get right to the complicated heart and soul of your subjects. It is a pleasure to witness.
See below for a very small sampling of Alessandra’s work and some background info, too!
Beekeeper in Gaza. 2020.
Alessandra: “She was funny, very confident, and she served us delicious tea and gave me honey to take back home with me. She loved the idea of her honey going all the way from Gaza to California. The Israeli army confiscated the honey on my way out.
I don’t know if she’s still alive.”
From her bio: Alessandra Sanguinetti was born in New York in 1968 and brought up in Argentina, where she lived from 1970 until 2003. She studied Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires until she left for NYC to enroll in General Studies at the International Center of Photography.
While home in Argentina, Alessandra began working on a project that evolved into her acclaimed series On the Sixth Day, which explored the relationship between humans and domesticated animals in the countryside south of Buenos Aires.
Five years into the project, Alessandra turned her attention to nine-year-old cousins Belinda and Guille, who lived on neighboring farms. Her work documenting their relationship has turned into a decades-long collaborative project. This work has been published in two monographs: The Adventures of Belinda and Guille and the Meaning of their Enigmatic Dreams (2010), and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (2020). Alessandra is working on a third project about Guille and Belinda as adults.
The images below are from Alessandra’s most recent book, Some Say Ice (2022), a portrait of people, places and animals in the small Midwestern town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, where Sanguinetti confronts photography’s uneasy relationship to life and death.
Point of interest to photo book nerds and people who came up in the late 80s and 90s and remember the book “Wisconsin Death Trip”: these images were created in the area that was documented by the town photographer whose images are used in “Wisconsin Death Trip”.
When Alessandra was around 9 or 10 years old, she created her own magazine called “The Bumble Bee”. In 2019, she began to experiment with painting and tied these paintings to her childhood magazine. Funny, sometimes political, and usually reflecting whatever happened to be on her mind on the day she made them. DDRC is lucky enough to have been able to collaborate with Alessandra to have a little zine made of these images! Stay tuned, this version of “The Bumble Bee” will be a special DDRC member treat down the line, but for now, I will share this little teaser with you!
For more info, please see: www.alessandrasanguinetti.info Magnum Photographers: Alessandra Sanguinetti
Instagram @alessandra_sanguinetti
Alessandra is a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a Hasselblad Foundation grant, a Discovery Award from Rencontres D’Arles, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Gardner Peabody Fellowship, and a John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, among other awards.
Alessandra Sanguinetti joined Magnum Photos in 2007 and became a member in 2010. She is currently based in San Francisco, California.
