Alessandra Sanguinetti

Gardner Photography Fellow, 2009

On April 13, 2009, the Gardner Fellowship committee awarded the Fellowship to Alessandra Sanguinetti, an award-winning photographer who divides her time between the United States and Argentina. Sanguinetti will be working on a project entitled “The Life That Came.”  

Ten years in the making, “The Life That Came,” grows out of an earlier project, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. In 1999, she began photographing two young cousins as they grew up in the remote farmlands outside Buenos Aires. She cultivated a close relationship with the girls over a five-year period, capturing their dreams and desires as their childhood ended, and they became young adults. Sanguinetti writes, “The Pampas is a mythical space rooted in Argentina’s identity, embraced by a society that celebrates men’s accomplishments, yet rarely acknowledges the lives of women… now the girls will enter not only the adult world they once imagined, but a more complex social one as well.” During her fellowship year, Sanguinetti will focus both on the two girls’ individuality and on the wider social networks and context in which they live.