Juxtapoz Magazine – Alessandra Sanguinetti Explores the Relationship of Photography and Death

Since 2014, Alessandra Sanguinetti has been returning to the small town of Black River Falls in Wisconsin, creating the photographs that would come to…

Link: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/photography/alessandra-sanguinetti-explores-the-relationship-of-photography-and-death/

Since 2014, Alessandra Sanguinetti has been returning to the small town of Black River Falls in Wisconsin, creating the photographs that would come to form the stark and elliptical series Some Say Ice. The same town is the subject of Wisconsin Death Trip, a book of photographs taken by Charles Van Schaick in the late 1800s documenting the bleak hardships of the lives and deaths of its inhabitants. Sanguinetti first came across this book as a child, and the experience is engraved into her memory as her first reckoning with mortality. This encounter eventually led her to explore the strange relationship of photography and death, and ultimately to make her own visits to Black River Falls.

A Photographer Revisits the Book That Taught Her About Dying

Inspired by an antique photo collection called “Wisconsin Death Trip,” Alessandra Sanguinetti went in search of her own American gothic.

When the photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti was growing up in Argentina during the nineteen-seventies, her mother kept on the coffee table a copy of “Wisconsin Death Trip,” a collection of photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by Charles Van Schaick. Made in the Wisconsin city of Black River Falls, they included studio portraits of elderly residents with worn faces and worn boots, images of large families outside small clapboard houses, and several postmortem portrayals of infants laid out in their coffins. “It was my first encounter with mortality—I remember thinking, I am going to die,” Sanguinetti recalled recently. “The book also introduced me to the idea that history is subjective. I had never seen history this way before. It had always been facts. It had always been dates. It had never been a mood, a feeling.”

Enigmatic photos of growing up in Buenos Aires

In a new book, photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti chronicles the everyday lives of her cousins as they navigate the transition from adolescence to adulthood in rural Argentina.

Link: Alessandra Sanguinetti Photographs the Drama of the Countryside | VICE United States

Halfway through that project, she started to photograph two cousins who lived nearby named Guille and Belinda. That series became her best known work, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, and has continued to expand as the girls have grown older, got married, and started having babies. I spoke with Alessandra about the cousins, the passage of time, and how taking photos adds a sense of order and permanence to our transient lives.