In her new book “Some Say Ice”— an eerie portrait of the people, places and animals of the small Midwestern town of Black River Falls—Alessandra Sanguinetti confronts photography’s uneasy relationship to life and death
In her new book “Some Say Ice”— an eerie portrait of the people, places and animals of the small Midwestern town of Black River Falls—Alessandra Sanguinetti confronts photography’s uneasy relationship to life 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…
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.
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.”
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.
Edited by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern and published by Aperture, The Photographer’s Playbook contains advice, exercises and insight from John Baldessari, Tim Barber, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jim Goldberg, Miranda July, Susan Meiselas, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Mark Steinmetz, Roger Ballen, David Campany, Asger Carlson, Ari Marcopoulos, Todd Hido, and many more. —Text compiled by Alex Nicholson
a photography and video commission started in 2013 with the work of Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alex Majoli, Jonas Bendiksen, Olivia Arthur and Gueorgui Pinkhassov
This year’s selection of grantees are Mari Bastashevski, Marko Drobnjakovic, Carlo Gabuco , Daniel Castro Garcia, Eduardo Hirose, Nneka Iwunna, Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, Musuk Nolte, Alessandra Sanguinetti and Faiham Ebna Sharif
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.
The idea of this group project was to create a fictional pre-election ‘news bureau’. So the whole approach was always with this in mind. What did Florida (Miami in my case) look like, what were people thinking, what did people look like
Last May, five Magnum photographers (Paolo Pellegrin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Mikhael Subotzky and myself) and the writer Ginger Strand, set out from San Antonio, Texas in an RV named Uncle J…
Ten Magnum photographers will be working in Rochester. Two of these photographers have already gotten started. A couple weeks ago, Alessandra Sanguinetti and Jim Goldberg picked up Uncle Jackson in Oakland and began driving to Rochester. You can see some pictures from their trip here.
On their way, Alessandra and Jim picked me up in Minnesota. Later today we’ll be joining Bruce Gilden, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Larry Towell, Alex Webb, and Donovan Wylie in Rochester. For two weeks we’ll be living together and working together.