Alessandra Sanguinetti

Born in 1968 in New York, internationally acclaimed photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti divides her time between New York and Buenos Aires.  This, her first major exhibition in Europe, presents some forty photographs from the series ”The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams” (1999–2002) and ”The Life that Came” (2004–2008).  

The two cousins Guille and Belinda were nine and ten years old when Alessandra Sanguinetti met them by chance while photographing farm animals at their grandmother’s home. Fascinated by their strong friendship, she began photographing them, crystallizing their rich but fragile and unsupervised life in a rural community on the Pampas in Argentina.   

In collaboration with Alessandra Sanguinetti, Guille and Belinda create their own imaginary space inspired by the expectations, fantasies and fears that accompany the transition from childhood to adulthood.  Gradually, the two girls become more comfortable in front of the camera, resulting in ever more inventive improvisations.   

Against the backdrop of the barren farming landscape, they use costumes, props and their imagination to stage tableaux, myths and dramas. They appear as Shakespeare’s Ophelia in the water, flower-decked and wearing long dresses; as the Virgin Mary and the Angel in their own version of the Annunciation; as alluring photo models; or buried alive in the mud.  They cross gender boundaries, change identities with each other and foreshadow their future in games of marriage, parenthood and death, sometimes mocking beauty ideals and codes for female behavior.  

In the more recent images, Alessandra Sanguinetti highlights a new stage in the lives of Guille and Belinda as they enter the adult world they once imagined.  Now the two cousins shape their own reality, face the fragility of changing friendship and confront early motherhood.  

Alessandra Sanguinetti explores the blurred transition between fantasy and reality in images that raise questions about the limits of documentary photography. The images are characterized by a penetrating gaze that reveals Guille’s and Belinda’s emotions and dreams, as they reveal the trusting collaboration with the photographer. They confront us with our own childhood and evoke memories of the total immersion in an imaginary world, more real than reality, while hinting at the life that is to come.  

In 2000, Alessandra Sanguinetti received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.  She received the 2001 Hasselblad Foundation Grant, the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award 2007, and the 2009 the National Geographic Magazine Grant and Robert Gardner Fellowship. She has been a member of the international photographic agency Magnum Photos since 2007.