Alessandra Sanguinetti was born in New York and raised in Argentina. In the late 1990s she began work on her critically acclaimed, long-term collaboration with cousins Belinda and Guille, chronicling their relationship in the context of their home on a farm near Buenos Aries. The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams is a superlative story of intimacy, imagination, and the transition from childhood to adulthood. Through both staging performances with Guille and Belinda and thoughtfully observing their interactions, Sanguinetti narrates a vivid story of the challenges, rites of passage, and wonder of relationality and imaginative life. In 2020 Mac Books published the second part of the series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer. This book presents Alessandra Sanguinetti’s return to rural Argentina to continue her intimate collaboration with Belinda and Guillermina, two cousins who, as girls, were the subjects of the first book in her ongoing series
Sanguinetti’s On the Sixth Day (2006), created over an eight-year period in the same Argentinian rural community, is a meditation on the relationship of humans to domesticated animals, articulating its complexities and contradictions. Her Sorry, Welcome (2013) is a beautiful, intimate account of the constellation of relationships within Sanguinetti’s family. Black River Falls (2014) took Sanguinetti to Wisconsin to photograph small town life through the lens of Michael Lesy’s cult project Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), which montages archival photographs with news clippings from Black River Falls and has profoundly influenced Alessandra’s fascination with the meaning of images since she first encountered it as a child. For Le Gendarme Sur La Colline (2017), Sanguinetti travelled through France by car and train, through rural and urban communities, finding and re-framing the idea of French nationhood and its traditions.
Sanguinetti is a member of Magnum Photos and the recipient of awards from la Fondation d’entreprise Hérmés/Aperture Foundation (2015); a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2008); a MacDowell Fellowship (2007); and a Hasselblad Foundation Grant (2001). Her photographs are held in museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.