In On the Sixth Day, Alessandra Sanguinetti turns her attention to the animals of a small Argentine farm, photographing chickens, pigs, horses, and cows from a perspective close to the ground. The resulting pictures attend to the texture of animal life: birth, play, competition for food, vulnerability, and death. Human beings remain present, but often as an imposing presence above the frame, shaping conditions whose consequences are never fully knowable.

Sanguinetti’s rich, almost surreal colour gives the work an unusual tonal register. The photographs recall traditional fables and classic children’s books, where animals act out recognisably human dramas and carry moral lessons. Yet the book resists turning its subjects into symbols. Each animal appears as an individual, possessed of an opaque and distinctive spirit. The directness of the gaze is crucial: the images neither sentimentalise rural life nor disguise the uncertainty of the animals’ fate.

The book’s significance lies in this productive tension between allegory and observation. Its sequence follows lives from birth to death, allowing the farm to become both a specific place and a stage on which questions of dependence, hierarchy, survival, and care are quietly enacted. For a serious collector, On the Sixth Day deserves attention as a concentrated example of Sanguinetti’s ability to make colour, viewpoint, and narrative structure carry complex emotional and ethical weight without resorting to explanation.

Published by MACK in 2023, this 96-page hardcover edition extends a work first published in 2005 with additional previously unseen images. Its generous 30 x 32 cm format provides an apt setting for photographs whose strangeness depends on both physical proximity and sustained looking.