On The Sixth Day
Alessandra Sanguinetti
Alessandra Sanguinetti (born 1968) is an American photographer. Born in New York City she moved to Argentina at the age of two and lived there until 2003. Currently she lives in California. Her main publications include The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, a more than twenty year long documentary photography project about two cousins, and Some Say Ice, an unnerving book on death and the mid-west.
In On The Sixth Day Sanguinetti explores the cycle of life and death through farm animals’s lives. She offers us a glimpse of life on a small Argentine farm from the perspective of its animals. From birth to their sometimes grisly demise. Often photographed close to the earth, the images offer an unique perspective on the daily life of chickens, pigs, horses and cows. Sanguinetti portrays this animals as individuals in their own right, relating their lives from birth to death with an unsentimental gaze. The images render the courage, struggles, and adventures of the animals. We see them newly born, at play, vying with each other for food.
She examines the symbiotic relationship between the farmers who live there and the animals they raise for food. In this relationship man is omnipotent. The fate of the animals is always uncertaing as human presences loom above. Sanguinetti spares us nothing of the process of butchery that using animals for food entails. This leads to images unsuitable for viewers with a weak stomach.
With their rich, almost surreal colour, these photographs evoke traditional fables or classic children’s books in which animals enact human behaviours to teach moral lessons. Although sometimes the rich warm colour of her images seems slightly at odds with the reality she portrays.
Certainly, Sanguinetti seems to be on the side of the animals, although she is not unsympathetic to the farmers, who barely scratch a subsistence living. She is extremely attentive to the power of the close-up. However, overt sentimentalizing is kept firmly at bay, and On The Sixth Day is ultimately an aesthetically beguiling yet clear-eyed look at a business that affects all of us, but which we so often push to the backs of our minds.
On The Sixth Day was first published in 2005 by Nazraeli Press. Now there is a new edition published by Mack.
On The Sixth Day
Photographer: Alessandra Sanguinetti
First published in 2005 by Nazraeli Press
2nd Edition published in 2023 by Mack
Embossed buckram, hardcover with tipped-in image
30 x 32 cm, 96 pages
Mentioned in The Photobook: A History Volume 3. Edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.