In Black River Falls

Eerie photos of a small Wisconsin town, from Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti:

The first time Alessandra Sanguinetti visited Black River Falls to take photographs, it felt, she says, “like a weird type of time travel”.

The destination she had in mind was the end of the 19th century, when a photographer named Charles Van Schaick was documenting life and death in the small Wisconsin town. Sanguinetti first encountered Van Schaick’s images aged nine, at home in Buenos Aires, leafing though a 1973 book called Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy. “It made a huge impression on me,” she says. “It made me ask for a camera and start taking pictures.” …

In 2014, after a decade living in the US, Sanguinetti, a Magnum photographer with a lyrical, dreamlike style, best known for her series centred on two cousins The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, made her first trip to Black River Falls. “I went with all my ideas about it, so it felt a little bit like being inside my nine-year-old mind.” That changed over subsequent visits, as she came to understand the town better and struck up friendships with its inhabitants. The ghostly quality of Wisconsin Death Trip persists, however, in Sanguinetti’s images, which she is now publishing under the title Some Say Ice.