Alessandra Sanguinetti has been awarded this year’s $50,000 National Geographic Magazine Grant for Photography in a competition open to all professional photographers which illustrates the “magazines ongoing commitment to documentary photojournalism.”
You can read more about the grant and see portfolios by the two previous recipients of this award, Jonas Bendiksen and Eugene Richards at the magazine, which doubtless will soon also feature Sanguinetti’s work. But as these names suggest, competition for the award is extremely tough.
Perhaps the most intriguing of the projects on Sanguinetti’s web site is a set of pictures taken from 199-2001 “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams”. This series in continued in “The Life that Came“, an exhibition at the Yossi Milo Gallery in 2008. The work follows the life of thse two young women, cousins who grew up on a farm near Buenos Aires, with images inspired both by their inner life and experiences as they move into adulthood.
Sanguinetti joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2007 and you can see more of her work on the Magnum site, although I find their overprinted copyright message particularly intrusive on work like hers. Pictures on the site include her work on domestic animals and a series of pictures – mainly portraits – from Palestine.
As PDN quote Susan Smith of National Geographic saying, she “has an original way of seeing that brings freshness to a subject…”