Since 2014, Alessandra Sanguinetti has returned to the small Wisconsin town of Black River Falls, creating the photographs that would become the gritty, elliptical series Some Say Ice. The same city is the subject of Wisconsin Death Trip, a book of photographs taken by Charles Van Schaick in the late 19th century that document the grim hardships of the lives and deaths of its inhabitants. Sanguinetti first encountered this book as a child, and the experience is etched in her memory as her first reckoning with mortality. This encounter eventually led her to explore the strange relationship between photography and death, and ultimately to make her own visits to Black River Falls. The austere, statuesque scenes and uneasy, ambiguous portraits that make up Some Say Ice portray a place almost out of time. Presented without embellishment of text or explanation, the photographs are touched with the spirit of the Gothic, as well as with the unmistakable family tenderness of Sanguinetti's series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda. Bringing currents of doubt and darkness to the surface of his images, Sanguinetti alludes to absent or invisible things, playing with atmospheres both real and imagined, as well as the ghostly possibility of undoing death through the act of photography. With its title inspired by Robert Frost's famous poem that gets one wrong about the best way to deal with one's inevitable death, Some Say Ice is a humane look at the melancholic realities that underpin our lives, seen with icy clarity by one of the most important photographers in the world.
Buckram hardcover with spikes on the front and back
28.5x30.5cm,
148 pages
