Peabody awards photography fellowship

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology has recently announced Alessandra Sanguinetti as the recipient of the 2009 Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography. Sanguinetti, an award-winning photographer who divides her time between the United States and Argentina, will be working on a project titled “The Life That Came,” inspired by an earlier project, “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams.”

In 1999, she began photographing two young cousins as they grew up in the remote farmlands outside Buenos Aires. She cultivated a close relationship with the girls over a five-year period, capturing their dreams and desires as their childhood ended and they became young adults. Sanguinetti writes, “The Pampas is a mythical space rooted in Argentina’s identity, embraced by a society that celebrates men’s accomplishments, yet rarely acknowledges the lives of women. … Now the girls will enter not only the adult world they once imagined, but a more complex social one as well.” During her fellowship year, Sanguinetti will focus both on the two girls’ individuality and on the wider social networks and context in which they live.