“The Photographs I Love" 8 – Scianna

“The world, life, people fascinate me.
I photograph them to try to get to know them, to get to know me, to express the thoughts, feelings, emotions they arouse in me.
To keep a track.
For me, photography is a story and a memory.”
(Ferdinando Scianna)

“Giovanna Rotolo”. Bagheria, 1981

The eighth choice, among my favorite photographs, finally takes us to Italy. 

It's not that in my country there are no important photographers, or not in my personal tastes. 

I love Felice Beato, Carubba, Giacomelli, Berengo Gardin, Ghirri, Pellegrin. 

And there are others. For sure, some of them I will talk about in future series.

Ferdinando Scianna

But this choice is for a photograph by Ferdinando Scianna, the Sicilian photographer born in Bagheria, in 1943.

With a degree in Literature and Philosophy, Scianna begins his photographic adventure documenting the religious rites of his Sicily; and it is during one of his exhibitions, in 1963, that he meets the writer Leonardo Sciascia with whom he will publish a book together: “Religious festivals in Sicily”, in 1965, when he was only 22 years old.

He moved to Milan and became a photojournalist for L'Europeo, for which he was a correspondent in Paris for 10 years. There he met Henri Cartier-Bresson with whom a deep friendship was born; it was thanks to him that he became the first Italian photographer to join the Magnum agency in 1982.

The moment of the death of the French master is described by Scianna as follows: 

“The nervous man died peacefully. He died as he lived, without fear. The escape specialist also succeeded in this.”

Scianna has its own peculiarity. He is the photographer whose written books I have more than photographic ones in my library. He loves to write a lot, and I love his style.

A talkative Sicilian, he writes a lot about photography and his memories, about how he lives and sees photography. I have already quoted several times his seminal book, “The empty mirror”, on the portrait.

But his bibliography is really rich. As well as his interests behind the lens, he photographed everything: portraits of artists and writers, India, Bolivia, the war in Beirut, Yemen, the streets of New York, created the myth of the model Marpessa with the advertising campaign of Dolce and Gabbana, sweet then are his shots of children.

Madras, India, 1989

Kami, Bolivia, 1986

The photograph I have chosen is not one of his most famous. Some are truly iconic and often appear when it comes to him.

This is a portrait of his maternal grandmother Giovanna, in Bagheria.

The relationship that Scianna had with his Sicily has never been simple, or painless; his writings are accurate testimony.

“I was born in Sicily, in Bagheria, a little village a few kilometers from Palermo, on July 4, 1943, at noon.

Dark times, times of war. [...]

My first memories belong to a poor peasant world, still immobile. A world that I found in certain places in India or Africa...

My mother did the same things in the morning that women did in Penelope's time, gestures that I found when reading the Odyssey at school. She lit the fire to heat the breakfast milk, washed clothes with her arms, knitted, embroidered. 

Around me the work was above all physical fatigue.”

 

Those places become an obsession, memory and hatred for him.

They are strong places from which one is forced to flee to experience a better existence, but which call you every moment, because when you leave you know that you are leaving behind a world that you will never find again.

And so it was. The beauty of the baroque villas had given way to illegal mafia building that tore apart those splendid lands and visions imprinted in his black and white fragments of heart, when he was a boy.

“We don't go away from Sicily. We flee,” he writes in the beautiful photographic book “The Geometry and the Passion”.

“Feast of the Crucifix”. Capizzi, Sicily, 1982

The theme of memory, the past and childhood is very dear to me.

Very often, in Asia, people ask me how Italy is and was, what are our traditions and I am having difficulty in answering. I feel more comfortable talking about the cultures of distant countries than mine, because now I feel I no longer have any roots.

But grandmother Giovanna touches me deeply.

“When she was young, my mother told me, she had been frail and in poor health. Then she lived a long and peaceful old age. Last of eight siblings. As soon as she was born, she lost her father. […] Grandma Giovanna was a virtuoso in embroidery. She had a beautiful voice and sang very well. […] Moral and psychological center of gravity of the house, like the Sicilian women of the past. She only left home to go to church or to visit some relative.

In the last years of her life I felt her regret: I have never entered a delicatessen shop, she said, I have never been to Lourdes.” 

He photographed her in 1981, in front of the chiffonier she loved, and he had surprisingly restored for her as a gift.

I was born in 1974.

In 1986 I was 12 years old. My grandmothers, maternal and paternal, were not so different from grandmother Giovanna.

My father's mother, Apollonia, from Salento, in South of Italy, was talkative and plump, mother of 8 children. My maternal grandmother, Clotilde, born in a very small village in the hinterland of Sardinia, was more silent and shy, she could not finish elementary school to go to work in the fields, and could barely write her name. Mother of 7 children.

They were both small in stature. Both survived the death of their husbands.

Grandma Clotilde     Grandma Apollonia

Scianna writes that that was a time of manual work, where people went around on mules.

I believe that my generation was one of the last to have had such grandmothers.

Looking at this photo I think that many of us have tears in our eyes, and an amalgam of sensations ranging from the hue of sadness for a world that has disappeared forever, to a sense of profound happiness, for having been lucky enough to be were the witnesses of a passage in time that we can still be able to tell those who ask us.

These were our grandmothers, not too cultured, if not completely illiterate, with short thoughts but big hearts and strong veined hands. With the black of mourning as an eternal promise of love to those who left before, without ever complaining about fatigue or hunger, whose husbands, our grandparents, knew fascism and war.

It was certainly not an easy past, and one must never indulge in simplistic praises of the past, as Scianna points out:

“Nostalgia represents, for me, a soft sentimental alibi, that thing that makes us say: 'Oh! How beautiful the world used to be!'”

 

It was a reality as hard as stone and as sour as sweat. But that was the Italy of the countries, the Italy of that time. Those were our grandmothers.

And Scianna portrayed it for us.

Search and read his books. He is one of the rare photographers who also has the sweet pleasure of reading.

“I think photography has given me more than I have given to photography.” (Ferdinando Scianna)

“Feast of Saints Alfio, Cirino and Filadelfo”. Trecastagni, Sicily, 1963

READ ALSO:

• Riding Time 
• The Factory of Permanence 

Ferdinando Scianna: “Geometry and Passion” (Contrasto, 2009)

Ferdinando Scianna: “Small worlds” (Contrasto, 2011)

Ferdinando Scianna: “Self-portrait of a photographer” (Mondadori, 2011)

Ferdinando Scianna: “I eat you with my eyes” (Contrasto, 2013)

Ferdinando Scianna: “Seen and writings” (Contrasto, 2014)

Ferdinando Scianna: “Ambiguous objective” (Contrasto, 2015)

Ferdinando Scianna: “The empty mirror – Photography, Identity and Memory” (Editori Laterza, 2014)

“Ferdinando Scianna” (FotoNote \ Contrasto, 2008)

Traditional song from Sicily: Cantu di li carritteri 
 

Italian version