Scianna's work takes us back to Hemingway and clearly to Sciascia, his mentor. Sicily is in common with the great writer Sciascia, an enchanting and complex island, crossed by millennia of different civilizations. The assonance of the two surnames, Scianna and Sciascia which suggests a common distant Arab matrix, but there is more, a partnership with Leonardo Sciascia, considered the key man of its existence, born in 1964 when the writer saw some photos of religious festivals exhibited at the Bagheria cultural club and left a note of compliments.
Sicily embodied by the model Marpessa Hennink, protagonist of the catalog of Dolce and Gabbana made precisely in Sicily, which makes him discover a theatrical vein which however starts from reality, from the street, as in all my shots. A fashion understood as a girl dressed in a certain way who lives in the world, not in a studio with artificial light.
Scianna has received numerous and important international awards; has published over sixty volumes; she has worked in reportage, portraiture, fashion and advertising. He writes about photographic criticism and communication, in recent years has practiced a hybrid literature, crossed over on text dialogue.
“My job is to take photographs Scianna says. and photographs cannot represent metaphors. Photographs show, they don't prove."
Ferdinando Scianna was born in Bagheria (Sicily) in 1943. He studied Literature and Philosophy at the University of Palermo. In 1963 he met Leonardo Sciascia with whom he published, a few years later, the first of his many books by him, Religious Festivals in Sicily, which obtained the Nadar prize. He moved to Milan where, from 1967, he worked for the weekly L'Europeo as a photojournalist, special correspondent, then correspondent from Paris, the city where he lived for ten years. Introduced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, he joined the Magnum agency in 1982. Since 1987 he has alternated reportage and portrait photography with fashion and advertising, with international success.
For years, he has also carried out a critical and journalistic activity which has led him to publish numerous articles in Italy and France on subjects relating to photography and communication with images in general. In recent years he has been engaged in a hybrid literature that marries text and image.
