In both Goldin and Sanguinetti’s images, you could write a soap opera of the little dramas unfolding in the center and at the edges of the frame. The sense of the photographer’s enmeshment in the world of the pictures-whether the farm in Argentina, or a bedroom in downtown New York City or Provincetown, Massachusetts-is palpable. So was Nan Goldin, whose use of color in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is similar to Sanguinetti’s striking palette in the project. “I unfolded it in a fable-like manner emulating the stories I grew up on in order to make the familiar and ordinary, extraordinary.” “That’s all the colors there are in the pampas, really: the blood, the sky, the grass, and the dirt.” In the pictures she would make, the palette of primary colors and earth is rich, ravishing and even a bit lurid and fabulistic, echoing the fairy tales she devoured as a child-Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, the story of The Devil’s Golden Hair. “I’d think of the countryside-blue, green, red, brown,” she says. This was a place full of life and untold stories. “On the other side of that was the cliché of the sunset and the gaucho galloping through the water”. Photographers tended to render the flat horizon of the pampas in a melancholic black and white, pictures emphasizing qualities of “emptiness and desolation,” Sanguinetti says. The photos that existed of the place failed to match what it meant to her. “It’s such a part of Argentinian identity,” she says. These childhood images of animals began returning to her as ideas for photographs, in a much-mythologized and respected territory-the campo, the country. Sanguinetti was in her twenties when she enrolled at the International Center of Photography. The subject is the essential holiness of acknowledging the lives and deaths of these creatures, magnifying their doings, witnessing their losses and passing. The project and the 2005 Nazraeli Press book of the same name borrow a biblical title, but there’s no actual religion embedded here. Like creation stories, in which time collapses the entire arc of life, the sequence of photographs that make up Alessandra Sanguinetti’s project, On the Sixth Day, seem to simultaneously inhabit a single day, and a lifetime. In them her camera finds the heart of the violence and the sheer range of vivid experience in the intimate worlds of farm animals. I was imagining myself in their place, looking at them as if I was one of them,” says the photographer of these pictures, whose vantage point avoids the sentimentality we tend to adopt around animals when they are not on our plate. “It was about paying attention to everyday animals, and the relationships they have with each other. Looking out over the bed of the pickup that delivered it here, a brand-new arrival, a duckling covered in yellow fuzz pops up out of a cardboard box, apprehensively regarding its new home, the approaching chickens and beasts, the sweep of life rushing over the dirt towards the truck. The blur of a cat prowling just-butchered carcasses on a table interrupts a still life of lime and pomegranate and wine bottle. A wild ostrich strolls nonchalantly by, visible underneath the body of a mare nursing its foal. Chickens regard the lifeless fetus of a calf.
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