Magnum Photos presents a selection from Alessandra Sanguinetti’s Some Say Ice at its Paris gallery, located in the 11th arrondissement. It is the first exhibition worldwide to exclusively present works from Sanguinetti’s remarkable fifth book, published by MACK in September 2022.
Alessandra Sanguinetti first traveled to the rural town of Black River Falls in Wisconsin in 2014, a place she first came across as a child through a copy of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, found on the bookshelves of her home in Buenos Aires. Sanguinetti describes this encounter with the lost generations of Black River Falls as the moment she first acknowledged her own mortality, and an essential motivation behind her early interest in photography.
The book — and now the exhibition — presents a mysterious juxtaposition between mortality and timelessness. The austere intimate portraits and group shots, together with images of animals, domesticated and wild, alive, and dead, and the ghostly houses and interiors, function as scattered clues to a tale that is never fully explained, leaving us to imagine and piece together what takes place between the pages. Taking its title from Robert Frosts poem “Fire and Ice”, in which the poet meditates on whether the world will end in the fire of desire or in the iciness of hate, the frozen unyielding landscapes are a foreboding reminder of the inevitable.
