“Some instinct to deny or stop death is probably behind every photograph and every selfie being made,” suggests the Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti, “no matter how banal. [It’s] a Sisyphean effort to assert our physicality and existence.” Aged just nine when she first recognised the medium’s potential, the photographer was hugely affected after encountering Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip while growing up in Buenos Aires. Published in 1973, the cult classic uses a series of written and photographic work (the latter by Charles Van Schaick), to examine tragic and bizarre events that occurred in and around Jackson County between 1885 and 1900, and was ultimately the catalyst for Alessandra to start making images of her own.
While her subsequent work is more concerned with portraying life and the ways it’s lived – she spent two decades documenting a pair of cousins in the Argentinian countryside, published in 2003 as The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams, and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer in 2020 – for her latest monograph Alessandra has returned to morality and Michael Lesy. In Some Say Ice, which takes its name from Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice – “I meant this book to feel like a riddle, Frost’s poem spoke to that” – the photographer experiences Wisconsin on her own terms.
“Even though I’d never been to Black River Falls, nor anywhere in Wisconsin, I felt like I was going ‘back’ there,” she says. “I had an imaginary familiarity and intimacy with the place because of growing up looking at Wisconsin Death Trip, so once there I felt like I was going back to a place I’d been.” Despite toying with the idea for a number of years, it was only in 2014 that Alessandra, who’s now based in California, made the journey as part of a Magnum project with Postcards From America: Wisconsin was the destination. “I took that as a sign that it was the right time,” she says. More trips followed to create Some Say Ice, most recently in 2022.
“On my first visit I arrived, fittingly, at night in the middle of a snowstorm,” she says. “When I saw the Black River Falls town sign from the car window, I felt like I was time traveling back to that moment of dread and discovery I had on first seeing Wisconsin Death Trip.” She recalls that initial introduction in the new book’s endnote too, writing of how “dread and wonder became one,” after she realised she would never have been able to observe the book’s subjects without the photographs. “Soon after this, I started photographing everything and everyone in my life, to keep us all from disappearing,” she concludes.
Staying in town for a fortnight at a time, the photographer found a generous community that was proud of their state, and who viewed her interest in their world as something quite natural. “Some people I met for as little as 30 minutes and spoke with only briefly, others I made friendships that outlive the work, such as the reverend Teri who leads his congregation in a small storybook-like chapel in Black River Falls. Kay, who homeschooled her seven children to perfection, and Wesley, who I met through Craigslist, a beautiful teen who walks barefoot in the forest snow searching for seeds and climbs trees like a cat.”
As in Wisconsin Death Trip, Some Say Ice arrives in black and white, a nod to the austerity of the earlier work and Alessandra’s own desire to do away with the distractions and additional information colour implies. Working in schools and churches, on farms and at community events, her images feature coffins, spoons and kids hanging upside down on a sofa; taxidermy, figurines and close-ups of a shirt and tie, as well as a police officer facing up to a dog in the snow, and a teen sports team. “Wisconsin Death Trip was my motivation to work in Black River Falls, but not the model for the structure of the work,” she explains. “There are allusions or winks to it though, as with the image of the horse at the beginning, and I had its old group portraits in mind as well. But Black River Falls has no semblance to what it was at the turn of the 19th century; neither was I looking to make it look that way. It was my own Wisconsin trip.”
Alessandra Sanguinetti’s ‘Some Say Ice’ is available here.
Credits
All images courtesy of the artist and MACK.