The Artist: Alessandra Sanguinetti Reveals the Magic of Childhood

For more than 25 years, Alessandra Sanguinetti has been photographing two cousins as they grow up in the Argentine countryside, removed from the distractions of the modern world, playing out their interior imaginations. The pictures are some of the most distinctive images of childhood in contemporary photography: two girls dressing up, inventing games, lying in fields, playing at death, marriage and motherhood, their everyday lives transformed into something poised somewhere between documentary and fairytale.

The American photographer does not hide her presence, and often interacts with the girls or asks something of them, and yet you have the feeling that she is not so much imposing on their childhood as revealing its magic. This singular approach has brought her work, and her subjects, to the attention of the wider world, at least in photography circles. But what was much less apparent was that Sanguinetti was making a film at the same time.

“I used some of the videos when I gave lectures, two-minute things, and I talked about how, at some point, I was going to make something with them,” she tells The Art Journal. “They weren’t hidden. They were always in my mind.”

The result is The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, Sanguinetti’s first feature film, which premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival last week, winning both the Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present category and the Swatch First Feature Award. Made from footage accumulated across a quarter of a century, it is both immediately recognisable to anyone who knows her photographs and yet unexpectedly different.

The setting is the farmland of Buenos Aires province, around three hours south of the Argentine capital: the vast, flat landscape of the Pampas, given over to cattle and agriculture, and historically mythologised through the figure of the gaucho. Guille and Belinda (Guillermina Aranciaga and Belinda Stutz) grew up on neighbouring farms, their families working as puesteros, looking after other people’s land and cattle.

It is a landscape Sanguinetti knows intimately. Born in New York in 1968, she moved to Argentina as a child and later studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. Returning to the countryside in the 1990s, she began On the Sixth Day, photographing farm animals and the cycles of life and death around them.

Courtesy the artist

The work established qualities that have since made Sanguinetti a distinctive and influential photographer: an intense concentration on apparently hidden worlds, an interest in lives normally relegated to the edges of the picture and, above all, a willingness to stay. A Magnum member since 2007, with work in collections including MoMA and SFMOMA, she has built a particularly loyal following around the pictures of the two girls and the two books that have so far emerged from the project.

Yet its origins were characteristically unplanned. While making On the Sixth Day, Sanguinetti became fascinated by the granddaughters of a woman whose animals she had been photographing. The countryside itself interested her because she felt photography had failed to represent the place she knew. It tended, she says, to become either “a metaphor for loneliness, barbed wire and emptiness” or the romantic cliché of “the gaucho and the sunset”.

“What most people viewed as an empty landscape, I saw as full of life,” she says.

First it was the animals she believed people weren’t looking at closely enough. Then it was Guille and Belinda. “Anybody going by would just see two little, ragtag girls,” she remembers. “But there’s so much more to it if you just stop and listen and look.”

That act of stopping, listening and looking became a project lasting most of their lives.

The first five years were published in 2010 as The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. A second volume, The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, followed in 2020, taking the cousins from adolescence towards adulthood, as games of marriage and motherhood began to encounter their real-life equivalents.

The photographs are remarkable partly because Sanguinetti takes the girls’ imaginary lives seriously. Guille and Belinda dress up, perform, imitate adults and invent identities. Reality and make-believe continually pass into one another.

Courtesy the artist

I had wondered, before seeing the film, whether moving images might somehow diminish that mystery. Sanguinetti’s best-known photographs are so self-contained that the girls seem to become characters within their own mythology: brides, mothers, performers, dreamers. Even when grounded in the mundane particulars of rural life, the pictures can feel like something remembered from a dream.

The film does something else, bringing us into their world, both real and imaginary. We hear Guille and Belinda talking when there appears to be nobody else listening. We hear their songs, jokes and fantasies, watch them dance and play, and listen as they imagine what adulthood might contain. The camera stays when a conventional film might cut. It gives space to the apparently inconsequential exchanges through which their relationship reveals itself.

And gradually we understand that these games are not incidental to the story. They are the story. Children spend enormous amounts of time rehearsing possible selves: playing at being mothers, lovers, performers and adults. Sanguinetti has the extraordinary advantage of being able to place those fantasies alongside the lives that followed them.

“After, let’s say, five years of photographing and filming them, I saw patterns that would repeat themselves in their conversations, or little gestures and things they would say that later would become true,” she says. “I became really interested in how much we can become ourselves, how much control we have over who we become.”

So, despite the quiet remove of the world she presents, and its lack of consequence to world events, the film explores profound questions of belonging and becoming. As Sanguinetti puts it: “How do you become who you are?”

Courtesy the artist

The film also makes the larger social world more apparent. This is a landscape whose mythology has traditionally been overwhelmingly masculine. At jineteadas, or rodeos, men would look at her in puzzlement as she ignored the supposedly important action and concentrated on two little girls. “I was conscious that stories of young girls in that area hardly exist. Stories of women as main characters in that area also hardly exist,” she says. “Men’s work is celebrated. Women’s work is invisible.”

Sanguinetti had around 80 hours of footage but for years did not know what to do with it. The decisive intervention came from producer Julia Solomonoff, who asked her in 2016 whether she had considered filming the girls. Sanguinetti told her she already had 80 hours. Solomonoff offered to produce it and began turning that accumulation into a feature.

Even then, Sanguinetti resisted conventional structure. “I knew what I didn’t want,” she says. “I didn’t want this to be about my photography. I didn’t want it to be about me.” She changed editors before finding someone who shared her instinctive approach. “I get excited about making work when I don’t know how it’s going to end,” she says. “Making the film was sort of discovering.”

That resistance to knowing in advance connects Sanguinetti's photography and filmmaking. Both depend upon duration and attention rather than pursuit of a predetermined result. Over the years, eager children became self-conscious adolescents and then adults with families of their own. Sanguinetti had to renegotiate the relationship too.

“I had to get to know them again and relearn them,” she says. “I also changed. It was always a process of getting to know each other again.”

Time performs another trick on the film. Its earliest sequences now document a world before smartphones and social media colonised childhood. Sanguinetti had no intention of recording the end of an era, but recognised it while editing: “This would not have happened now. They would have been on their phones.” The countryside has changed too, as people leave the farms for towns.

It would be easy to make such material nostalgic, and the title almost invites it. But The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer is ultimately about the impossibility of stopping time. Childhood ends. Friendships change. Imagined futures become actual lives.

The photographs can momentarily defeat that process, suspending Guille and Belinda within the strange, heightened world they made together. In the film, voices continue, bodies move, conversations wander, children become adults. And perhaps that is why, unexpectedly, the film makes us feel we know them better. The photographs preserve the extraordinary dream world they created; the film allows us to enter it with them.