THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Two Girls Rehearsed Their Futures for Her Camera at Nine. She Stayed 25 Years to Watch Them Arrive.
In 1999 Alessandra Sanguinetti, then 28, was working on the farmland south of Buenos Aires, photographing rodeos, slaughters and births for a book about animal life. Two cousins lived on neighboring farms there, Guillermina and Belinda, both nine. She paid attention to them “more and more and more,” she told Magnum in 2020, “until it took shape as this body of work. But I never thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to find two girls.’” The animal book came out in 2005 as On the Sixth Day, and the cousins became the work of her life.
Sanguinetti was born in New York in 1968 and grew up in Argentina. She spent childhood summers on a farm in the same countryside. She studied anthropology in Buenos Aires and photography at the International Center of Photography in New York, then went home to work. She joined Magnum in 2007 and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
What makes the project different is who runs it. Guille and Belinda acted out their futures for her: weddings, pregnancy, funerals, surgery on dead animals. Sanguinetti brought props from her mother’s farmhouse, such as old issues of Vogue and art books on Caravaggio, and asked, “Wouldn’t it be fun to play with this?” The cousins took it from there. “They never did anything they didn’t want to do,” she said. “As soon as they were tired, or there was something they were uncomfortable with, they would tell me.”
Then the games came true. The first book, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams (Nazraeli Press, 2010), follows them from late childhood into their teens. The second, The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (MACK, 2020), picks up after they had married and had children. One picture shows Guille’s belly after a caesarean. Sanguinetti asked the cousins about it on a video call. “No, no, we love it,” they said. A third book is in progress.
Over those years she also shot about 50 hours of video. This year it became her first feature, The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, a 94-minute documentary. It premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in August and won the Golden Leopard of the Filmmakers of the Present competition and the Swatch First Feature Award. In September it won two awards at San Sebastián.
Her method comes down to a few habits, and any photographer can borrow them. The first is to stop. Driving past the farm, she has said, “you would have seen these two little scrawny kids just in the distance and that would have been it.” The second is to distrust the easy frame: “If I’m just trying to get a good picture, I should stop, because I’m not growing; not learning anything.” The third is to change along with the people in front of the lens. When the cousins grew up, she put the camera down for whole visits: “I just want to get to know them again.”
WHY IT MATTERS
Photography is usually praised for stopping time. Sanguinetti’s project works the other way. Its subject is the time between pictures, the years in which two girls’ games of marriage and motherhood turned into real marriages and children. It was made with their consent, and partly on their terms.
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
Richard Avedon: Hollywood
Gagosian | Beverly Hills
November 4 – December 19, 2026
In the summer of 1956 Avedon was in Paris, consulting on Funny Face. The Stanley Donen musical starred Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, and it was loosely based on his own early career. For a while he thought about giving up photography to direct films. He stayed a photographer, and Hollywood stayed his subject for the rest of his life. The Richard Avedon Foundation has picked more than 120 photographs from over half a century. The sitters run from Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe to Tilda Swinton and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Well-known portraits hang next to rarely seen ones.
Lebohang Kganye: Le Sale ka Kgotso
Fotografiska Tallinn | Tallinn
November 6, 2026 – March 7, 2027
Kganye was born in 1990 and is based in Johannesburg. She has built a full-size house for visitors to walk through. It is modeled on the RDP homes that South Africa’s government began building under Nelson Mandela in 1994. Inside are five staged scenes drawn from township stories, folklore and family memory. The title means roughly “stay in peace” in Sesotho. It is a goodbye said when leaving someone’s home. Said slightly differently, it calls up the tokoloshe, a dangerous spirit in Xhosa and Zulu belief. “What photography has always been about is evidence,” Kganye says, “but actually it is also the tool of imaginary.” The show comes to Tallinn from Berlin and Stockholm. She gives an artist talk on November 5.
Karen Knorr
Musée national Eugène-Delacroix | Paris
November 5, 2026 – January 3, 2027
Knorr is an American-British artist born in Germany. She makes each picture from two kinds of photograph. One is a room, shot with a large-format or digital camera. The other is an animal, photographed in a reserve, a zoo or the wild. In her series India Song, the animals walk through palace rooms in India. Here the series hangs with the museum’s show of Delacroix’s horses and other animals. So big cats, horses and peacocks move into the painter’s apartment too. The show is part of PhotoSaintGermain, from November 5 to 28.
Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026
National Portrait Gallery | London
November 5, 2026 – January 17, 2027
The prize used to be called the Taylor Wessing. Four photographers made the shortlist, and the winner is announced November 3. James Clifford Kent, who taught himself, photographed Neisser, a 16-year-old fencer. The picture was made in a five-minute encounter in the family’s living room in Pinar del Río, Cuba. Marcie Docherty dressed four men as an American football team, in wrestling shorts and polished leather shoes. Katie Hitchcock-Smith staged a Western with two friends and a camel in eastern Morocco. Max Pattenden, 24, met ten-year-old Havannah at a Halloween party in Lee Moor, a china clay village on the edge of Dartmoor.
Arthur Jafa: Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death
Chrysler Museum of Art | Norfolk, Virginia
November 6, 2026 – April 25, 2027
The video is seven and a half minutes long. Jafa is a cinematographer and director, born in 1960. He cut found footage from films, news broadcasts, viral videos and archives to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam.” The clips go back and forth between Black joy and police violence. He changes their speed and order to get what he calls “Black visual intonation,” a sense of timing taken from Black music. The title comes from MFSB’s 1973 song “Love Is the Message” and a 1973 story by James Tiptree Jr. The work is on loan from the Dallas Museum of Art. The museum warns that it contains strong language and real racial violence.
WHAT’S ON AROUND THE WORLD
Opening This Week
Berlin
Miji Ih: Mouths: On Water and Whisky — Fotografiska Berlin · Nov 4 – Jan 13, 2027 (her largest solo show yet, with photographs, archive material, sound and video)
Landskrona
Stephen Gill: Truths Undisclosed Reveal Unspoken Words — Landskrona Foto · Nov 5 – Mar 28, 2027 (more than 30 years of work; a companion show is at Galleri Format, Malmö)
New York
Masao Gozu: Windows and Bars — MoMA PS1 · Nov 5 – Mar 15, 2027 (his first US museum show)
Paris
Wilhelm von Gloeden: Photographies — Galerie Au Bonheur du Jour · Nov 4 – Jan 30, 2027 (vintage prints from two collections; appointment preferred)
Rafał Milach: Last Resort — delpire & co · Nov 5 – Jan 9, 2027 (work on protest; part of PhotoSaintGermain)
Closing Soon
Berlin
Katharina Sieverding: Life–Death — Galerie Thomas Schulte · Closes Nov 7
Düsseldorf
Valérie Belin: Le songe des idoles — Van der Grinten Galerie · Closes Nov 7
Los Angeles
Thomas Demand — Matthew Marks Gallery · Closes Nov 7
Ongoing
A rotating selection of shows worth the trip, beyond the openings and closings above.
Amsterdam
Hailun Ma: Hometown — Foam · Through Jan 20, 2027 (her first major solo show outside China)
Antwerp
Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to Fly With — FOMU · Through Jan 17, 2027
Berlin
Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter — C/O Berlin · Through Feb 3, 2027
London
Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography — Tate Modern · Through Feb 21, 2027
Paris
Raymond Depardon — Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection · Through Jan 25, 2027
Rotterdam
Plastic Sea, Perfect Storm — Kunsthal Rotterdam · Through Mar 7, 2027 (Rob Hornstra and others)
FESTIVAL WATCH
Photo Days 2026 — Paris and Île-de-France · Nov 2–30 (seventh edition; agnès b. is this year’s patron)
PhotoSaintGermain 2026 — Paris · Nov 5–28 (15th edition, 38 free exhibitions on the Left Bank; opening night Nov 5, 6–9 p.m.)
Paris Photo 2026 — Grand Palais, Paris · Nov 12–15
OFF THE PRESS
Earth Not a Globe
Gnomic Book
Philippe Braquenier takes his title from a 19th-century book by Samuel Birley Rowbotham. It was the founding text of the flat-earth movement, which still has believers today. Braquenier turns the believers’ own method against them. He makes “forensic” photographs by cropping, cutting up and recaptioning images until they seem to cast doubt on gravity and the earth’s rotation. He leaves the marks of his handiwork in plain sight. The book is about how a picture persuades, and that includes his own pictures. Essays by Marie Papazoglou and Colin Dickey. 256 pages, first edition of 500, $45, pre-order for delivery in November.
Something Out of Nothing: The Photography of Guido Guidi
MACK
Since the 1970s Guido Guidi has photographed the country around his home in north-eastern Italy, often without going far. His subjects are houses, barns, tools, mounds of rubble and dirty snow. In this book-length essay the writer Louis Rogers follows Guidi from the black-and-white pictures of his youth to the large-format studies of place he is known for. Rogers traces how much the work owes to painting, especially early Renaissance religious art. He also shows how Guidi holds the exact and the mysterious in the same frame. It’s part of MACK’s DISCOURSE series of short books. Paperback with flap, 12.5 x 19.5 cm, 144 pages, $20 / £15. Pre-order now; it ships in March 2027.
Truth + Kitty: A Las Vegas Love Story
Dewi Lewis Publishing
In 2012 David Harriman went to Las Vegas to photograph environmental excess. On Fremont Street he met Truth and Kitty, a couple who made their living by recycling. He stayed with them for 14 years. In that time they lost their housing and lived in motels and underpasses. They spent time in jail, and for a while they lived in a mountain cave that looks out over the Strip. Their relationship began to fray. Harriman has also made the project into a feature documentary. Hardback, 192 pages, £35, now shipping.
OPEN CALLS
Sony World Photography Awards 2027: Series — Jan 12, 2027, 4 p.m. GMT · free · $25,000 and the Photographer of the Year title for the overall winner; 5 to 10 images across ten categories, entrants 18 and over (the Single Image competition closes Jan 5)
Wildlife Photographer of the Year, 63rd competition — Dec 3, 11:30 a.m. GMT · £35 for adults, free for ages 26 and under and for photographers in eligible countries · run by the Natural History Museum, London; up to 25 images
Fotografiska Emerging: Coming Together — Dec 3, 10 a.m. CET · no fee listed · five artists each get €300 and a feature on Fotografiska’s platforms; one image per submission, up to five, on togetherness and community. Opens Nov 2
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