SLEEP, THEN THERE
Not the least of the fascinations that promotes photography which each photographer took a picture different from each face or each object. For such conditions as may be distance or light, each photographer chooses a different frame rate or the most intimate and projected himself when choosing a particular frame and not another. Why would one, when photographed, it is another and different according to the photographer: an invention of the artist who always has something unusual to do with death and memory?
Faster than you thought the picture when there is the "decisive moment" that Cartier-Bresson talked about and what ultimately matters in the end, is that the pictures have soul and a certain, very particular look.
There is another case of the Sicilian Ferdinando Scianna, born in Bagheria, a step in Palermo on July 4, 1943, and has just published two wonderful books: Dormire, forse Sognare and Viaggio a Lourdes. The first one shows true to his habit of sleeping people portray throughout your trip (in Colombia, India, Africa, Asia): a tribute to the sleeper (which is a sacred animal, said Pepe Revueltas), an inventory of sleep. The second is a wordless story about a group pilgrimage to Lourdes Italian.
I first heard of Scianna was for the credit was given in a photographic portraits of Sicilian writers, the same certainly adorn the walls of the Italian Library here in Mexico, in the Plaza Rio de Janeiro. After I met him when he jumped from Oaxaca had been photographing some models Cuilapan, and we knocked on the door of our apartment in Stockholm, in Colonia Juarez. He asked us to join him to see Garciela Iturbide and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Graciela next day took him to visit the Casasola archive in Pachuca, who did not want to miss. Scianna
began taking photographs at a young age in 1960, at age 18, he studied literature and philosophy at the University of Palermo. In 1962 he met someone who would be one of the most significant friendships (by bonding and artistic affinity): Leonardo Sciascia. Photographer and writer met because once, when at age nineteen was riding his first exhibition in Bagheria, Ferdinando Scianna was found with a page in the guestbook full of praise and enthusiasm, in black ink, signed by someone that had passed through: Leonardo Sciascia.
With the author of The parishes of Regalpetra published in 1965 in Sicily and Religious festivals in 1989
prepare-with the master typographer Sciardelli Franco, also resident in Milan Sicilian a beautiful little book of all his friendship with the Sicilian novelist of 1964 to 1989. As a stylish black passport, Leonardo Sciascia da Ferdinando Scianna fotografato opens not only a collection but an editorial idea, which aims to collect a friendly and creative relationship between a writer and a photographer over many years (like the could do with Juan Rulfo Ricardo Salazar, Rogelio Cuéllar Octavio Paz, Juan Vicente Miranda Paulina Lavista Leñero or with Salvador Elizondo). Thus, the curious book opens with a photograph of Racalmuto, Sciascia's people in the region of Agrigento, and continues with successive images of the novel until the day of his death. You feel the passage of time: the smile of maturity, the joy of the creator, the illness that seen in the last days of 1989.
Trasterrado to Milan since 1966, undertaken as a freelance photographer Scianna an intense period of a story that led to the U.S., Africa, and Latin America.
For nine years, from 1974 to l983, Scianna was Paris correspondent for the Italian magazine L'Europeo, but there also was traveling to various parts of the world where it had been before: the Chile of Salvador Allende, the Uruguay of the Tupamaros, the Ethiopia of the famines and droughts, Czechoslovakia where soldiers Russians pointed and kidnapped their photos. ECCO LE FOTO CHE CI AVEVANO SEQUESTRATE RUSI I was reading on the cover of L'Europeo, 1968. Unico
Italian team Magnum agency founded by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer Sicily was one of those selected to illustrate the number of American Photo Magazine (March-April 1992) dedicated to "Euro style "ie, to the best European photographers. Also in the fixed section of the publication that appears on the last page, under the title Case study, where a photographer each month displays all instruments, cameras, lenses, exposure meters, leaving their bags, the photographer chosen for the number of 1993 was Ferdinando Scianna. "I respect my team. But I'm not a collector of cameras. A camera has to work well. That's all," he said then, as he showed two Nikon FM2, a Canon EOS 10S, a Nikon N6006 and a Nikon F-801 ( European version of the N8008).
not easy to decide what Ferdinando Scianna's book that best represents the sensitivity of man and artist, his look, it's not uncommon sadness, compassion.
In all his photographs are a glimpse of the same look, the eye of the unconscious that captures the "decisive moment", without any intellectual premeditation between the retina and actually frozen, but "every photograph is a thought: one thought visible", as Manuel Vazquez Montalban says in the preface he wrote for Le form of chaos: a summa of all the work of Scianna over the past 30 years.
precisely in this anthology that will form the chaos was inaugurated in the Roman Villa Medici on June 29, 1992, images of Sicily Scianna roam the halls of the gallery, from the religious parties the 60 to the last shots of the Dutch model Marpessa.
can be enjoyed in its pages, the route that this world has made the photographer, since the image of an emaciated dog that surprised in the streets of Benares (India) to another of Jorge Luis Borges that he took in Palermo in 1984. Multitudes in Ethiopia or in India, faces that come and sneak into various peoples Sicilian women's face covered in Tunisian sites, evidence of the horror and desolation in the icy streets of New York or Paris subway system will allow guess the eyes of a photographer of our time that might have made his book more round in Kami.
Title volume is the same mining town of the high Bolivian-operated since 1908, but extraordinarily productive in the 30's when he discovered tungsten and was acquired by Simon I. Patiño Ferdinando Scianna, who attended in 1987. "The camp where they live these men and women and children, these miners, called Kami, as the mountain of the Bolivian Andes, more than 3 800 m altitude," he says in the foreword to the photographer-writer-reporter . In Kami, Bolivia, the names designating the history and geography are names of mountains and mines in its "dark and hard belly suggest hundreds of miles of galleries: the Cerro de Potosi, which for her udder was generous centuries gold and silver, and one of the centers of the world, Llallagua Catavi, Siglo XX, Huanuni, Milluni, Kami ... "
The testimony of the miners, few, very succinct, the photographs accompanying the cold and weddings, the band of family ceremonies, the ovals of faces and hats and freshly baked breads, the swollen cheeks of coca, the pictures on the walls of the child and absent uniformed, metal helmets with a focus in front , the plush women bowlers.
Was this because the description of the reality of Kami, not complete or exhaustive, Ferdinando Scianna has done. "To be complete I should have used language physician, anthropologist, sociologist, economist, historian, politician. But I have none of these trades. I have only the photographer, with humility, pride, trying my best to use the instruments of my own language, "Scianna said.
" During my last trip to Kami I explained some of the photographs in the hospital. Everyone in the camp came to see them. The pointed laughing. Many asked me a few copies. I hope that these photographs have been recognized in the same way that I, through them, I have tried to recognize them. "
Another of his most recent books, Marpessa-A racconto, which depicts the model Marpessa on the streets and corners of several Sicilian towns, as their native Bagheria may seem paradoxical if one recalls the career of the photographer, his images of religious festivals, his snapshots of the Soviet soldiers on the streets of Prague, the body of a victim of the mafia, mobs of drought and mannish in rural areas of Ethiopia, the desolation of certain people Yorkers or Parisians, Manhattan bridges, those attending the funeral of Sartre in a Paris cemetery, the faces Kami miners of Bolivia, which make up Kami, his best book, perhaps his masterpiece. However, both work for the fashion industry and its graphic reports are part of a comprehensive work that can not be parceled, and proof of this way of integrating the triviality of fashion to the solitude of the faces in the corners of southern villages are in each of the pages Alrove, reportage di fashion, recounting a photographer in the world of models continues its very personal perception of life. Photographer
to write, Scianna is also responsible for the prologue of piaciere di leggere Il (Ed. Franco Sciardelli, Milan, 1997) that includes the photos of the Hungarian André Kertész, who died in New York in 1985, characters from different times and places ( New York, Paris, Budapest) committed in a dumpster or in a park on a roof or on a train, the antisocial act of our time reading.
"Kertész proposes, I think, at this historical moment, some basic questions as who wonders if the meaning of things can still be read-or write-or if the reading is still the great game through which decrypts the world. Which, after having been for centuries, for better or for worse, we are not sure to remain. Although you may believe, when we see pictures of Kertész, that the world is a great book, "writes Scianna.
Like almost all photographers and artists all, Scianna is not fond of walking giving explanations of their works. No But at the end of Dormire, forse Sognare includes this notation:
"If reality is, as I believe, the mirror of the photographer and not the reverse, traveling tens of thousands of images that for many years, we will deliver the camera is as verifying that terrible Brancati Vitaliano hypothesis: that a picture a day from the face of a man, from birth to death, is but the dramatic projection of a lifetime. "
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