ALESSANDRA SANGUINETTI

The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams

January 13 - March 9, 2003

In the remote farmlands near Buenos Aires, Argentina, Alessandra Sanguinetti produced a series of photographs entitled On the Sixth Day that centered on the symbiotic relationship between the farmers, their animals, and the land. While working on this series she first met Guille and Belinda whose families lived and worked on these farms. The two cousins were ten and nine years old when Sanguinetti began to photograph them. Sanguinetti sought to portray the psychological and physical transformations of these girls as they matured into adults. As opposed to a more traditional documentary narrative of these two girls growing up in this rural environment, Sanguinetti instead focused on the desires and dreams of their active imaginations. Sanguinetti writes, "I have attempted to interpret the ending of their childhood by entering their imaginary spaces. The time when their dreams, fantasies, and fears would fuse seamlessly with real day-to-day life are ending, and the photographs I have made intend to crystallize this rapidly disappearing very personal and free space." The resulting series of images, presented here under the title The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams, represents not only an elaborate collaboration between photographer and subject but an intimate relationship cultivated over a five-year period.

In 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot coined the phrase "the art of fixing a shadow" to describe his negative-positive photographic process that became the basis of the photographic medium. Since then critics and historians have written at length about the metaphorical role photography plays in preserving the past and halting the fleeting moment. Childhood is a very brief period of personal development and discovery, perhaps even more so for Guille and Belinda where the onset of adulthood comes at an early age. The enigmatic dreams and fantasies from the fertile imaginations of Guille and Belinda might have gone unobserved if not for Sanguinetti's efforts. Through this archive of images, which are as inexplicable as the imaginations that choreographed their content, this fleeting shadow of youth is preserved.