Photography and Eye

Crossing. Photo by Alessandra Sanguinetti

The Peabody Museum of Archeology & Ethnology at Harvard University announced yesterday that Alessandra Sanguinetti is the 2009 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, the second $50,000 award Sanguinetti has received this year. Last week it was announced that the photographer, who is based in New York and Buenos Aires, was awarded the National Geographic Magazine Grant for Photography.

Sanguinetti received the grant to continue her “The Life That Came” project documenting the lives of two Argentine women who are cousins. “The Life That Came” grew out of Sanguinetti’s “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams,” an earlier project documenting the cousins over a five-year period as they moved from childhood to young-adulthood. “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,” writes Sanguinetti of the project. “Now the girls will enter not only the adult world they once imagined, but a more complex social one as well.”

The Robert Gardner Fellowship, named for the award-winning documentary filmmaker and author who was formerly the director of Harvard’s Film Study Center (1957–1997), funds the work of “an established practitioner of the photographic arts to create and subsequently publish through the Peabody Museum a major book of photographs on the human condition anywhere in the world.” Sanguinetti, who was nominated by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art senior curator of photography Sandra Phillips, is the third Robert Gardner Fellow. The two previous fellows are Guy Tillim (2007) and Dayanita Singh (2008).

“During her fellowship year,” the museum’s announcement says, “Sanguinetti will focus both on the two girls’ individuality and on the wider social networks and context in which they live.”

Sanguinetti tells PDN she was very surprised to receive two grants for two different projects in the same year. “Usually when you apply for grants you expect to get one if you’re lucky,” she says.

The National Geographic grant will fund her documentation of sustainable agriculture and transgenic, or genetically modified, crops in Argentina, the United States and Canada.

“It’s a huge opportunity,” Sanguinetti says of the two projects, “so I’m just going to take it on.” She plans to travel to Argentina in July to begin work on both projects, and envisions shuttling back and forth throughout the year.

The book that she will eventually produce through the Robert Gardner Fellowship will be the second of two volumes documenting the lives of her Argentine subjects. Nazraeli Press, who published her first book, On The Sixth Day (2006), will likely release the first part of the project this October, she says,.

Asked how the Robert Gardner Fellowship and National Geographic Magazine grant rank among the grants she has received in her career, Sanguinetti says, “All of them are important. The first grant I got for maybe $1000 in Argentina made a world of difference to me too, because at that time in my life and at that stage of my work, I was supported and encouraged.” Sanguinetti has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and Hasselblad Foundation grant among other accolades.

Sanguinetti says that she and her husband, photographer Martin Weber, have been supported mostly by grants since 1998, when Weber won his Guggenheim fellowship.

A Magnum Nominee since 2007, Sanguinetti says she does not think the awards will have any influence on voting to make her a full member of the agency. “My instinct tells me that everyone there is self-confident and they wouldn’t be swayed by somebody winning a prize or not. They’re going to have their own opinion of that person’s work, but I’m just speculating.”

After suffering a fracture in her back in 2007 that prevented her from lifting a camera for a year, Sanguinetti says the grants could not have come at a better time. “It’s incredible… I am going to make up for lost time.”

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