Some Say Ice
Alessandra Sanguinetti
In Some Say Ice Alessandra Sanguinetti acts as if she is a small-town photographer. You know, such a photographer who tells you “Say ‘Cheese'” when he or she takes the picture. It is a custom used by photographers who want their subject or subjects to smile. In Some Say Ice Sanguinetti plays with this and other conventions of portraiture.
Alessandra Sanguinetti born in 1968 in New York moved at age two to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sanguinetti is a photographer with a lyrical, dreamlike style. She is best known for her series centred on two cousins: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda.
In the final pages of Some Say Ice Sanguinetti shares a story from her childhood in Buenos Aires. On her mama’s bookshelves she found Winconsin Death Trip, a book by Michael Lesy. This book from 1973 contains photographs from Black River Falls in Winconsin taken by Charles Van Schaick in the late 1800s. Understanding that everyone in that book was long gone, and if it weren’t for the pictures she wouldn’t have been able to see those people. Soon after this, she started photographing everything and everyone to keep them from disappearing.
Inspired by Michael Lesy’s Winconsin Death Trip led Alessandra Sanguinetti to make her own visits to Black River Falls. Since 2014 Alessandra Sanguinetti has been returning to the small town of Black River Falls. Maybe she was looking for a place where time stood still. I don’t know if she found it in Black River Falls. But I think she created one in Some Say Ice: a place without time. The influence of Winconsin Death Trip is also visible in the pictures. A cropped torso af a long-haired workhorse reminds us of the first photo in Michael Lesy’s book.
The first photo in Some Say Ice is a circular calendar. Time as a continuous loop, where the same events keep recurring: birth, school, work and finally death. All pictures have a out-of-time feel. When a photographer takes a picture, that moment in time is frozen. People die, memory fades but we still have the pictures to remember people and events. These pictures are timeless, they last forever without ever changing.
But the book is not only about the timelessness of pictures. It is also about the conventions of portraiture. In contrast to the typical small-town photographer, like Charles Van Schaick, Sanguinetti is playing with the conventions of portraiture. For instance, in many portraits some people are looking at the camera while others are looking either next to the camera (maybe to the assistant of the photograper?) or to the side or upwards. In another picture, the formal expectations of a basketball team portrait are derailed by a player’s spontaneous balletics and a player looking at her instead of the photographer. There’s a picture where three children cast their shadows against the aluminium siding of a home. Is it a rare beam of sunlight or the spotlight of the photographer which lights the scene? In the last picture three beauty queens hold hands, as if they leaning on each other for support against the gaze of the photographer and us, the viewers.
That makes the photographs look unnatural. Sanguinetti’s photographs are enigmatic and it feels as if they contain a hidden message. There is something uneasy lurking under the surface of the images. Maybe Sanguinetti is playing games with us. It doesn’t matter, because it makes for a beautiful book.
Some Say Ice
Photographer: Alessandra Sanguinetti
Publisher: Mack Books
Published in 2022
Buckram hard cover with tip-ins front and back, 28,5 x 30,5 cm, 148 pages
Chosen by people immersed in the photobook world as one of their favorite photobooks of 2022