Ferdinando scianna biography samples
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A few months after we met, Amelio found himself working as assistant director to Vittorio De Seta on the film Un uomo a metà. Everyone was a great intellectual, starting with the editor, Tommaso Giglio.
During those years, I gradually acquired my training mainly thanks to my relationship with the fellow journalists I travelled with.
That was my first professional job.
In 1966, I left for Milan. There was no possibility of returning; if I had gone back, it would have meant a total existential defeat.
To tell the truth, everything turned out to be relatively easy.
In September 1967, I was hired by L’Europeo, thanks to Roberto Leydi, who knew my photographs, and I began working as a photojournalist, again with lots of enthusiasm and very little practical experience.
L’Europeo
The atmosphere at the magazine was unique; it was a kind of university of Italian journalism.
He was exceptionally generous to me, both critically and personally.
When I decided to resign from L’Europeo in 1982 and return to Milan, Henri encouraged me to apply to Magnum.
I was accepted.
In Italy, I went back to doing what I’d always wanted to do: work as a freelance photographer. Feste Religiose in Sicilia(1965) included an essay by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, and it was the first of many collaborations with famous writers.
Scianna moved to Milan in 1966.
I was 45 years old.
Doing that exhibition, that book, meant accepting a challenge. At dinner, we met Diego De Donato, who published mainly scientific and legal texts, but also a beautiful series of books, Piccolo orizzonte, featuring writings and images. This was really terrifying, so my parents wrapped me up in the placenta, so to speak, and took refuge in the countryside.
Adolescence
I studied at a classical secondary school.
He left a note for me with his compliments.
Some time later, I went with my grandfather Benedetto to photograph the Serpentazzo festival in Butera, later passing through Palma Di Montechiaro, where Danilo Dolci had held a kind of conference on poverty. I managed to integrate into the French professional and cultural life quite well, something that was absolutely unimaginable when I arrived.
He moved to Milan in 1966 and started working as a photographer for L'Europeoin 1967, becoming a journalist there in 1973. It was then that he began to photograph the Sicilian people systematically. Then, my father and I started to argue, to disagree. He studied literature in Palermo but soon realized that words were not enough: he needed images.
The True Story of the Life of Ferdinando Scianna in his own words
I was born in Bagheria, in the province of Palermo, on July the 4th, 1943.
We were in the thick of the war and two hours later, two hundred metres from my home, a bomb exploded. Not bad for a boy from Bagheria, right?
However, his importance lies not only in his awards and accolades, because Scianna changed the way we see the world, demonstrating that photography can be at once documentary, poetry, social criticism, and philosophy.
His images do not shout, they whisper, forcing us to stop and look.
His portraits of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges were published in 1999, and in the same year, the exhibition Niños del Mundo displayed Scianna’s images of children from around the world.
In 2002 Scianna completed Quelli di Bagheria, a book on his home town in Sicily, in which he tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of his youth through writings and photographs of Bagheria and the people who live there.
Source: Magnum Photos
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He is the photographer who makes silence speak.They needed a set photographer and Gianni thought of me. The way Sicily was back then reminds me of what I found later on in the poorest countries in the world.
I took some photos and was outraged.
On the way back, I stopped in Racalmuto to look for Sciascia.
It was August the 16th, fifty degrees in the shade, and I asked where Sciascia lived.
The Sicily that emerges is not folklore, but a theater of the soul, and from then on, Scianna never looked back.
His most important works (and why you can’t miss them)
Scianna is one of those photographers who cannot be pigeonholed. But Magnum is not a safety net.
Fashion
In February 1987, Dolce and Gabbana approached me to shoot a catalogue of their collection.
He entered the field of fashion photography in the late 1980s and at the end of the decade he published a retrospective, Le Forme del Caos(1989).
Scianna returned to exploring the meaning of religious rituals with Viaggio a Lourdes(1995), then two years later he published a collection of images of sleepers – Dormire Forse Sognare (To Sleep, Perchance to Dream).
We became very good friends.