Alessandra Sanguinetti

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 to enroll in general studies at the International Center of Photography in New York (1993).

Back home in Argentina, she began working on what became On the Sixth Day (2005), which explored the relationship between humans and domesticated animals in the countryside south of Buenos Aires. Five years into the project, she turned her attention to two nine-year-old cousins, Belinda and Guille, who lived on neighboring farms. Sanguinetti initially followed the two girls for five years, but the work has turned into a life-long collaborative project, capturing the girls into their adulthood. This work was published in two much-acclaimed monographs, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams (2010) and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (2020), with a third volume in the making.

Sanguinetti has also published Sorry, Welcome (2013), a meditation on family life; Le Gendarme sur la colline (2017), the result of an Hermès/Aperture commission; and Some Say Ice (2022), a portrait of people, places and animals in the small Midwestern town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, her confrontation with photography’s uneasy relationship to life and death. A new and expanded edition of On the Sixth Day (2023) includes additional unseen images. She is currently completing work on the daily life of Palestinian society under the decades-long land and water theft, human rights violations, military occupation, and genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli and United States governments.

Sanguinetti is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hasselblad Foundation Grant, a Discovery Award from Rencontres d’Arles, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Gardner Fellowship from Peabody, and a John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, among other awards.

Sanguinetti joined Magnum Photos in 2007 and became a full member in 2010. She is currently based in San Francisco, California.