Milan in the Eye – Ferdinando Scianna at the 1966 Milan Fair

“In 1966, I set off for Milan.

I do not have any pathetically great bohemian stories to tell, though. I fell in love with Milan straight away. Back then, it was a very different city to others in the north, open and generous towards new arrivals—much more than today, it seems to me. I was looking for work and was not coming across much, but I did find some. The first furniture I had were cardboard boxes, but I had been let an apartment, I knew people, and I was full of energy.”

These words come from the pen of one of the greatest Italian photo reporters of the twentieth century, Ferdinando Scianna, from his autobiography, Autoritratto di un Fotografo [Self-portrait of a Photographer].

What those few lines reveal is not just a memory from an ordinary life story, but the marking of a watershed moment, witnessing a turning point in the young Sicilian photographer’s life.

Born in Bagheria, in the province of Palermo, on 4th July, 1943, Scianna owes his success to an encounter with one of the leading Italian figures of the second half of the twentieth century, Leonardo Sciascia.

The encounter came about by chance, in 1963. Scianna, attracted by idea of telling a more authentic and less stereotyped story of Sicily, had recently completed a journey, guided by his childhood memories, along the streets of towns celebrating religious festivals, where he had photographed faces and situations, shining a light on relationships between humans, the environment, and the sacred.

His take was more anthropological than aesthetic, placing photography at the service of reality. An exhibition of photos from that intense reportage work was then organised at the cultural centre of Bagheria, which Leonardo Sciascia visited, together with a friend they had in common, Vincenzo D’Alessandro. The two did not meet there, however. It was Sciascia, struck by the poetics of the young Sicilian photographer, who left him a congratulatory note.

Some time later, on 16th August of that same year, on his way back from Butera, where he had been to photograph the Serpentazzo festival, and from the extremely poor village of Palma di Montechiaro, Scianna decided to take a detour to visit the writer in Recalmuto.

It was in Sciascia’s country house that the spark between them was lit, forging a profound bond of friendship and artistic intent between the two men that would last twenty-seven years.

Scianna, a devourer of life, had found the “key person” of his life.

It was Sciascia who sent a selection of the photos Scianna had taken in Palma di Montechiaro to Davide Lajolo, editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Vite Nuove. The outcome was an eight-page feature with a narrative thread written by Sciascia himself, providing a framework in words for the penury captured by the young photographer.

In late 1963, it was the writer again who penned the presentation for Scianna’s first solo exhibition at the Sormani Library in Milan. Two years later, that short introductory page would become the backbone of the preface to Feste Religiose in Sicilia, Scianna’s first photographic book, published by Leonardo da Vinci in January 1965 as part of its “Piccolo Orizzonte” series.

The publication marked the first powerful appearance of quality photography in ethnological documentation. The photographs would earn Scianna the Prix Nadar in France, and later a portfolio feature in the 1966 edition of Photography Annual by the editors of the US magazine Popular Photography.

With that passport for his future career, in 1965 set off for Milan on his northern adventure.

One of the first jobs commissioned to Scianna came from the director of Publifoto, Vincenzo Carrese, who asked the photographer for a series of shots in Via Montenapoleone, Milan.

In reality, it was more of a challenge than a job, based on the provocation that it was all too easy and predictable to photograph poor people, religious devotees to boot, as Scianna had done for his book, as the emotional lever and empathetic engagement of the viewer was obvious.

Carrese had opened the agency Publifoto in 1937. Thanks to a dense network of photographers, it was able to provide photography for events of all kinds, with a preference for coverage of news stories, sport, and current affairs for the publishing market.
When Scianna knocked on its door, the agency vaunted several branches across Italy, partnerships with various newspapers (L’Unità, L’Europeo, Il Giorno), and a brief collaboration with the national wire service, ANSA, as well as plans to expand its colour photography service and work with private companies.

As he would write decades later, Scianna hung around the stylish street for days, photographing “Montenapoleonites” with “malice and sarcasm.” As he noted in La Geometria e La Passione, Milan struck him as “an Italian, if slightly European, crossroads, attracting poor people from the south still in the 1960s.”

Carrese, however, did not like the photographs produced by the photographer from Bagheria; they were gloomy and sorrowful, and “unsellable.”

Ever since the start of his career, Scianna’s photographs always featured precise lines and masterful composition, immersed deeply in the world shown, while at the same time dense with evocative power.

Photography was for him, as he would say many years later, a way of living.

“What is important is life, not the photograph. What is important is to tell the story. If you start with the photograph, you will never get anywhere beyond the photograph. (…) I mistrust people who shout out a language just to be heard from afar, to attract attention. The problem […] is not how loudly you shout; it is what you put into the shout, into the aesthetic density of the language.”

The never-to-be-published Via Montenapoleone job was not the only project commissioned from Scianna by Publifoto during his Milan years.

In 1966, Carrese sent him to cover the Milan Fair. The Fair Board today still holds forty-two of the photos he took in its archives, documenting one of his first experiences on the job as a photo reporter.

As the photos show, Scianna’s approach was not to search out curiosities to snapshot, but as usual he focused on encounters—on all that is implied by a relationship, or “a set of relationships between two people, one person, and a subject,” in whatever form it takes, even if it entails juxtaposition or contingency.

At the centre of his shots, we often find a situation or situations that attract attention.

Nothing seems to exist without the eye that grasps fragments of the world to capture in photographs.

As has been said of him, “Scianna does not photograph people or objects per se; he captures relationships, even those with the light, produced by black and white, and which can be surprising.”

Scianna’s photos show, without demonstrating, and in showing they portray reality for what it appears to be on the other side of the lens, without altering it to satisfy an expectation or a desire.

Milan opened the doors to his career.

In September 1967, he was hired by the magazine L’Europeo. There he learnt the ropes of the photo reporter’s trade in a “never-to-be repeated context of Italian journalism,” nourished by great intellectuals, “a world full of people out of the ordinary,” who made up a lively editorial team capable of expertly covering news stories and producing major reportage.

From there the future awaited, studded with trips across the world and back again, in which Scianna produced important reportage, both independently and as part of leading collective agencies, such as Magnum Photos.

With one constant that can be traced throughout his work, a sort of ethical principle that informs the poetics of his language:

“I do not believe […] that photographs have the force to change the world for the better, but I cling to the belief that bad photographs—and by bad I do not mean ugly, because beauty and ugliness in the world always need to be specifically defined—make it worse. So you are always responsible for what you do, and you always need to reach the highest levels of quality, also in linguistic terms, as well as in terms of clarity and sincerity.”