Alessandra Sanguinetti is only nine years old when she comes across, in her home in Buenos Aires, in Wisconsin death trip, a 1973 book by Michael Leasy that chronicles life and death in Jackson County and specifically in Black River Falls, a small town in Virginia. Texts by Leasy and clippings from the local newspaper, the Badger State Banner, accompany two hundred photos taken by Charles Van Schaick between 1885 and 1900.
Wisconsin death trip has become a cult book over the years: it is a singular and at times sinister work, which sequences the posed portraits of the inhabitants of Black River Falls, dead children displayed in their coffins – a normal commemorative practice at the time -, daily life, between work and outdoor trips, and photographic manipulations with multiple exposures that contribute to making the volume an object suspended between the visible world and another of which only suggestions reach us.
Sanguinetti is deeply struck by those pages: “I suddenly and without any doubt realized that death was a real thing and would happen to me too”, she says in a recent interview for her agency, Magnum Photos. Alongside the awareness of death, the little girl in Buenos Aires understands that photography is essentially a way to escape oblivion, to affirm our presence in the world and live forever, or at least as long as the image exists. The purchase of a Kodak Instamatic immediately follows the knowledge of the book and marks her entry into the world of photography. Leasy’s book and Van Schaick’s photos then become a ghost that she carries with her until in 2022, at the age of 54, she publishes Some say ice (Mack), the result of numerous trips to the same places as Wisconsin death trip.
In 2014, the photographer has now lived in the United States for ten years, on the coast near San Francisco, and heads for the first time to the cold and rural Midwest of Black River Falls. At first she approaches the community thanks to the support of the Milwaukee art museum, which allows her to enter schools and other local institutions. With each visit, she manages to get close to people, to gain their trust, which in some cases allows her to enter even more private situations. Sanguinetti tries to become a local photographer, as happened in Van Schaick’s time, called to record the most important moments of the community. If in the current era the photographer is synonymous with an excess of negligible images, Sanguinetti pursues the idea of a “sacred” photograph, used to remember truly important moments.
Some say icewhose title is inspired by the poem about the end of the world Fire and Ice by Robert Frost, however, avoids being a documentary work. “My intention was for the book to be an enigma, rather than a clear account of a place,” says the photographer, who leaves austere shots of Black River Falls and its surroundings, in which each face is crystallized in an eternal moment and where Facial expressions are reduced to a minimum to underline even more the mystery hidden in each image. Mystery reinforced by the symbolism that the author instead attributes to animals, both wild and domestic but always stronger than the humans photographed, considered spiritual companions and witnesses of the wickedness we commit every day.
The book does not adopt a well-defined narrative and chronological line as in previous works dedicated to the growth of two cousins, Belinda and Gullie, but, as she herself declares, “follows a trajectory towards the inevitable”. Some say ice it is a work that enchants without giving answers, it is a journey through dark places to reflect on mortality and close a narrative circle that began a long time ago in Buenos Aires.