Alessandra Sanguinetti

[ Note: Please give a warm welcome to Future Shipwreck's newest contributor, the lovely Grace Pettygrove. I've known Grace since high school, and she has never failed to help me see what others miss in the world. I can't wait to share her many talents with all of you! - Graham ]

Oftentimes photography feels like a form of thievery. The artist steals facial expressions and sunsets from their larger contexts, dropping in through the skylight and crawling away with life’s most visually provocative moments.

Then there are other photographers, like Alessandra Sanguinetti, who document change in a radical way: by staying in one place. In two essays, spanning a decade, Sanguinetti photographed a girlhood friendship in the Argentinean countryside. Guille and Belinda, as girls, explore “the Enigmatic Nature of Their Dreams.” The earlier images of their youth are intimate, fly-on-the-wall portraits of dress-up games and moments of utter inseparability—moments so particular to the friendship of little girls—interspersed with staged scenes that seem to remind the viewer of the ultimate mortality of young relationships.

It is sometimes difficult to decipher the staged photos from those that capture spontaneous games of make-believe between the friends, though one might assume with confidence that Guille and Belinda didn’t decide to play “drowning Ophelia” on their own initiative. In the later essay, The Life that Came, Belinda and Guille come into womanhood—motherhood and spinsterhood, respectively. The foreshadowing of …Their Dreams seems accurate; there is a cold distance between the adult pair.

Sanguinetti’s work lives and breathes without an audience. To view the albums of Guille and Belinda is a more intimate thievery, like eavesdropping on the neighbor’s backyard. The gate is closed now—Sanguinetti’s website disappeared on the 30th. Until she leaves it open again, view select photos online at Women in Photography or in print in Cabinet Magazine, Issue 36.