The Head-Turning Photography of Ferdinando Scianna
A brief trip through the archives of an icon
Italian lust. Red-blooded men, long-legged dark women, Sicilian dagos giving the ol’ lookover to the “talent” on the street. Nobody captured this on film better than Ferdinando Scianna. As a half-Sicilian, half-Russian mutt, I’ve found his work very compelling.
Scianna was a native of Bargheria, Sicily. He took up photography in the 1960s while studying at the University of Palermo. Eventually moving to Milan in 1966 where he spent time as a journalist and wrote on politics, literature, and photography for various publications. The Guardian wrote an interesting profile on him last year. In the interview he describes how he was drawn photography out of a desire to leave Sicily, but could never shake it out of his spirit.
“Even if I left Sicily, I photographed Sicily wherever I went. A few years ago, I made a book about a mining village in the Andes, and someone said it is my most Sicilian book. At the end of the day, a photographer always takes the same photos. I do not know if that is a style or just a repetition. Well, maybe it’s just boredom.”
His rise to fame came in the late 1980s. Approached by relative unknowns at the time Dolce & Gabbana, Scianna began a partnership with them that led him to the world of fashion photography. His first shoot for D&G was a catalog inserting the Dutch model Marpessa Hennink into his native Sicily. The work blended the styles of high fashion and gritty photo journalism. Capturing the model on the street aside on-looking men and boys.
I find his photos portray the beauty of women and that innate vril inside men. The spirit of liveliness, of being out on the hunt with desire. The street turns into a sort of runway stage for gawking and leering.
In addition to his fashion images, Scianna’s long career featured portraits of famous writers and photos capturing the places across the globe he traveled to. He had a close relationship with Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia who provided an essay to his first published photo collection Feste Religiose in Sicilia (Religious Feasts of Sicily).
Scianna is still alive today (he’ll turn 80 in July) but has put photography in his past, claiming not to have taken a photo in years. A nearly sixty-year obsession finally come to a close. There’s something kind of charming about the old man just one day deciding to stop. He took lots photos, some bad, some good, some great, and now he’ll sit back and let his life’s work speak for itself.
"Sicilian dagos" - please find other language, the term is both insulting and shows contempt for Italians and people of Italian extraction.
Interesting take on Scianna. He was a great photographer well before the D&G campaign. His photo-journalistic work in Sicily and other parts of Italy in the 60s and 70s stand out as some of the best of the period in Italy. Not that the commercial work here isn't great... it is.