Artist Project / Guille and Belinda

If, as Aristotle has it, the purest form of friendship is that between two people who are themselves truly good, then friendship between young children—before the vicissitudes of life begin to wear away at their inherent optimism, cheerfulness, and decency—must be counted among its most ideal incarnations. The artist Alessandra Sanguinetti began photographing Guillermina and Belinda, the two girls in the following suite of images, when they were preadolescents. Young cousins from the countryside outside Buenos Aires, where the artist lived for more than thirty years before returning to her native New York City in 2003, the two have grown up together as best friends under Sanguinetti’s gaze—through their teens into adulthood; from school to love affairs to marriage to motherhood. At once a portrait of inner life, a document of external circumstances, and a meditation on where the two spheres touch, Sanguinetti’s project details the constancy of a friendship against a background of change.