Alessandra Sanguinetti was born in New York, 1968, brought up in Argentina from 1970 until 2003, and is currently based in New York. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a Hasselblad Foundation grant. Her book "On the sixth day" was published by Nazraeli Press in January 2006. She has photographed for the New York Times Magazine, LIFE, Newsweek and New York Magazine.
I have been following the coverage of the Gaza invasion, and this photograph, printed on The New York Times front page on January 8th caught my attention for its bucolic feeling.
On that same day, January 7th, while these soldiers rested, 30 corpses were found under the rubble of a bombed building in Gaza, among them four starving children next to their dead mothers. See this article.
Israel has banned all foreign press from entering Gaza, but surely there must be images that are more relevant to the situation, as can be seen inside the paper.
Maybe I'm being picky, but knowing the power an image on the front page can have on the perception of events, I'd like to open a discussion on editorial responsibility: Why would a newspaper choose to represent a conflict of these proportions with this romantic image?
These photographs are not recent and they are not my best, but they live with me in a way that makes them more current than anything I could have done yesterday.
They are a handful of the very many photographs I made of my grandfather, Salvator Altchek. He was a doctor, a general physician in Brooklyn, practicing in the same office since 1936 until 2002, when he died. He was my hero, my favorite person in the world. You couldn't walk down the street with him without people stopping and hugging him. People I would have never glanced at or paid attention to suddenly came alive. When someone gave him a handshake he grasped them by their wrist and took their pulse. He would accept $10, cookies, or nothing at all if a patient couldn't pay. He knew everything about everyone in the neighborhood - all the deep dark secrets- because patients would feel better just talking to him. He could detect what was going on with someone by their smell, their skin, and their disposition.
He would often send patients home prescribing a nice warm meal , and someone to talk to. He would also stay up at night worrying about them. When I lived with him in 1992 while I was studying at ICP, being a hypochondriac I also couldn't sleep sometimes, and we would sit side by side watching late late news on his blurry tiny black and white no-cable tv, and I would feel so safe and right. New York was fun with him. He wasn't wise in a solemn way; he just enjoyed people, and he cared about them.
I moved to New York a few years ago, and we are for the time being living in what used to be his office. His waiting room is our living room; my daughter sleeps in what was his examination room, and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of him to make me smile.
My move to New York coincided with the worsening of a chronic condition for which I constantly visit many kinds of doctors and have to deal with the health care system here in the US. I came from Argentina with this clueless notion that things worked better in the US, especially medical care, and I soon realized why my grandfathers patients loved him so much. I am jealous of them, that they had him as their doctor, and I also understand now how unique he was during the 80's and 90's. He was the last of a kind, most had already retired while he was still making house calls.
