SANDRA BACCHI
“When I couldn’t eat strawberries, I pretended watermelons were strawberries.”
— 5 years old Vitória Bacchi to a friend who also had multiple food allergies
In WATERMELONS ARE NOT STRAWBERRIES I seek to better understand myself and to increase my awareness of how I react to challenges related to my experiences as a mother. The work is a blend of conceptual and documentary photography that reveals the shapes, textures and shadows of my love for motherhood as it merges with a lifetime of my own personal anxiety. The work grows into a story of resilience, perseverance, hope, and mutual support.My two daughters were challenged with severe food allergies and learning difficulties in their early years. In helping them to cope with their adversities, I was forced to delve into my own dark places to confront the deeply entrenched fear, shame, and guilt that stem from my then-undiagnosed dyslexia and celiac disease.
Food allergies and learning differences were the starting point of my journey in challenging my fears to be different. Once I let go of the rules and expectations I created for myself, which were not working for my daughters, the whole family dynamic changed. I didn’t want them to feel the constant neurotic need to fit into the social norms, as I did my whole life. We established our own “normal” way to live our lives, creating a sense of complicity, understanding, and empathy among each other, building a stronger relationship. In the beginning, it was a lonely path focused on trying to adapt and adjust my expectations of parenting. It turned into a life journey and artistic inquiry as I traced a connection between my childhood and my daughters' childhood.
Dyslexia, ADHD, food allergies and celiac disease are all connected through families’ DNA. Therefore, while I was advocating for my girls, I learned how to advocate for myself. While I was trying to understand my daughters, I deeply understood myself.
Sandra Bacchi is a Brazilian photographer, based in Pittsburgh, PA. As a visual artist, she blends documentary and conceptual photography with her background in cinematography to tell her stories, weaving fiction into the truths to express more open-ended storytelling.
Sandra’s main focus is to inquire how human beings interact with each other and how we can find similarities among ourselves. Bacchi sees the world and its people as a combination of layers. Each person brings different layers to their complex relationships. Ancestors, family history and life experiences create the layers within each person. In that sense, Sandra believes that when we take the time to value the differences in others, we are more open to exposing the differences in ourselves, and to be able to live a more full and expressed life.
Photographers such as Angela Strassheim, Philip Lorca Dicorcia and Gregory Crewdson inspire Sandra’s work narrative, while Bernard and Hilda Becher, Irving Penn and Francesca Woodman contribute to her visual references.
Earning a degree in photography at Escola Panamericana de Artes (São Paulo, Brazil -1997), Sandra turned her focus to cinematography, working on short films, documentaries, and commercials, in São Paulo and New York. In 2001, Bacchi attended the Hungarian International Cinematography Workshop, taught by Academy Award winner Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs. In 2012, Sandra moved to NYC with her family and returned to her roots in photography at International Center of Photography.
Sandra’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published in contemporary photography magazines and Zines, such as LensCratch, A Curator, and Don’t Take Picture. Between 2017 and 2019, Bacchi’s photographs were part of group shows at Griffin Museum of Photography, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Houston Center for photography, The Center for Fine Art Photography, among others. Bacchi has attended several portfolio reviews, including the Review Santa Fe 2018 and Woodstock Portfolio Review.
Since September 2019, Bacchi has been an artist-in-residence at Pittsburgh Glass Center, developing work that mixes photography with glass. Her work will be part of the Center’s “The United Exhibition” in October 2020 and will explore the sense of belonging.