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| ©Alessandra Sanguinetti |
| Click photo to launch a slideshow with more images from On the Sixth Day. |
On the Sixth Day
By Alessandra Sanguinetti
Nazraeli Press; 80 pages; 61 color plates; $65
A lessandra Sanguinetti admits that her eight-year study of rural farm life changed her. "As I became more involved, I became less judgmental, and more open to the subtleties and complexities of our relationship with animals and how they reflect on us," she explains. Her audience is likely to traverse the same range of reactions while processing Sanguinetti's monograph about the project.
Many photos in On the Sixth Day seem grotesque: Chickens hover over a sheep fetus like vultures; a skinned horse lies in a pool of its own blood. But the viewer soon realizes this is only part of the story. Here a chick surmounts the box entrapping it; there a lamb is helped to suckle by a farmer's gentle hands.
For the book, Sanguinetti returned to her father's farm in Argentina, where she summered as a child. In 1996 she began making photos with a Hasselblad and natural light, exploring the "cruel and contradictory relationship [humans] have with nature."
After receiving a Guggenheim grant in 2000, Sanguinetti also followed a related story, about the granddaughters of Juana, a woman who lives near the Sanguinetti farm. Her images of the young Argentine cousins play-acting -- "The Adventures of Guille and Beli" -- were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires and Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, where "On The Sixth Day" also appeared in 2006.
The book is not linear -- morning to night or birth to death -- but it encompasses each of these, mimicking nature's instantaneous transition between them. Humans are shown to be predators, but by shooting from the animals' perspective Sanguinetti depicts them not as masters of the animal kingdom but simply as one of its many subjects.
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