Alessandra Sanguinetti: My Favourite Books
Rosalind Fox Solomon
Liberty Theater (MACK)
From the title, to the cover, the red endpapers, the no-buts-about-it first image of the KKK belt buckle, page after page I feel like I’m quietly, oh-so-gently being punched in the gut. That wrought iron gate to hell, those scary fox masks, the entitlement written all over white people’s faces, the look of weariness, pain and distrust on the face of the woman shelling nuts.
Where are they all now? Some are gone, but what about their children? The cotton candy boy – what’s he up to now?
Nan Goldin
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Aperture)
Oh… The Ballad…
I first saw it in 1993 when I was beginning to find my own voice in photography, and this marked a before and after. I think I know every picture in that book by heart, as if it were my own.
My life was so much tamer than that of Nan Goldin’s group of friends, but I identified with the hunger for love, connection, community and freedom, and I still do, though now when I go back to it, it’s twinged with nostalgia and longing for what was and what wasn’t.
I lived in Argentina at the time, so I didn’t get a chance to see the slideshow until much later, but that was fine. The small softcover book did the job, and it survived the million times I’ve looked at it.
Jim Goldberg
Raised by Wolves (SCALO)
When I met and fell in love with Jim I didn’t know Raised by Wolves. I don’t understand how it eluded me for so long and wonder how it would have influenced me if I’d seen it when it came out.
All that layering of drawings, notes, contact sheets, official documents, film stills, receipts and maps; the mix of classically beautiful portraits and raw moments, all these add up to this immersive experience and understanding which feels like being inside a film. I can almost smell and hear the streets the kids were on, feel their loneliness. It’s raw, direct, harsh, loving, and honest. A document and poem to all kids everywhere who were dealt the wrong cards, were misunderstood and never got a break.
Michael Lesy
Wisconsin Death Trip (University of New Mexico Press)
WDT, with its moody, gloomy, kaleidoscopic storytelling of a particular place and time in history, is the book that’s had the most profound effect on me — probably because I first saw it when I was a child, and it singlehandedly made me face the fact that I could in fact die at any moment, and that if not now, it would happen when I was impossibly old and wrinkled like the woman at the end of Chapter 1.
It was also responsible for me deluding myself into thinking that photography was the only sensible way to fight the passing of time.
LaToya Ruby Frazier
The Notion of Family (Aperture)
I love this book. I feel like I’m being let in (not intruding, not spying) to see what’s going on, to see her relationships past and present, generations hurt by powers beyond our reach, to see the destruction of a community and to see it’s ruins. But all the time, the way they — LaToya and her family — stare back at the camera, at me I Imagine, I feel as though I’m being dared to stay. Her mom, grandma, and grandpa are like ghosts standing ground in a home that seems to be disintegrating, together with the community outside the door. All on our watch. I’m filled with love for this family, and impotence and rage at those forces that did this.
Alessandra Sanguinetti
The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Engimatic Meaning of Their Dreams
This volume, originally published in 2010 and reissued now as the first instalment of a trilogy, chronicles the first five years of Alessandra Sanguinetti's collaboration with Guillermina and Belinda, two cousins living in rural Argentina. Sanguinetti’s images portray a childhood that is both familiar and exceptional, set against the farmlands of Buenos Aires Province, where labour and fantasies alike are played out in consonance with the animals and rugged landscapes.
Embossed linen hardback with tip-in
May 2021
€60 £55 $70
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The signed edition includes an extra image plate signed by the artist and glued into the inside back cover.
€65 £60 $75
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Alessandra Sanguinetti
The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (First edition, Second Printing)
In this second volume, we follow Guillermina and Belinda from ages 14 to 24 as they negotiate the fluid territory between adolescence and young adulthood. Still surrounded by the animals and rural settings of their childhood, Everlasting Summer depicts the two cousins’ everyday lives as they experience young love, pregnancy, and motherhood — all of which, perhaps inevitably, results in an ever-increasing independence from their families and each other.
Embossed silk linen hardcover with tipped-in image
June 2021
€60 £55 $65
Add to cart (pre-order)
The signed edition includes an extra image plate signed by the artist and glued into the inside back cover.
€65 £60 $70
Add to cart (pre-order)