VIAGGIO RACCONTO MEMORIA

JOURNEY STORY MEMORY


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”I’m no longer certain, though I once was, that you can better the world with a photo. I am still convinced, however, of the fact that bad photographs can make it worse.” – Ferdinando Scianna

From 31 August 2019 to 2 February 2020, the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice will be hosting an anthological show by Ferdinando Scianna (Bagheria, Sicily, 1943), one of
the reference figures of contemporary international photography.

The show, curated by Denis Curti, Paola Bergna, and Alberto Bianda, art director, organised by Civita Mostre e Musei and Civita Tre Venezie, and promoted by Fondazione di Venezia, covers more than fifty years of this Sicilian photographer’s career, through 180 works in black and white, divided into three wide-ranging themes: Journey, Story, Memory.

Ferdinando Scianna began to be enthusiastic about photography in the 1960s when he began to recount through images the culture and traditions of his native Sicily.
During his long career in art he has touched on many themes – current events, war, travel, popular religion – all united by a single leitmotif: the constant search for a form in the chaos of life.

In more than fifty years of narration there has not been, of course, any lack of propositions: from Bagheria to the Bolivian Andes and to religious festivals – at the
beginning of his career – to his experiences of the fashion world, begun with Dolce & Gabbana and the iconic model Marpessa. Then there was reportage (from 1982 the
first Italian to be part of the Magnum photojournalism agency), landscape, and such thematic obsessions as mirrors, animals, things and, finally, portraits of his friends, such masters of the art and culture world as Leonardo Sciascia, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Jorge Louis Borges, to mention just a few.

Scianna himself has stated with regard to his work, ”As a photographer I consider myself to be a reporter. As a reporter my basic reference point is my master par
excellence, Henri Cartier-Bresson, for whom a photograph must aim at being an invisible witness which never intrudes in order to modify the world and the moments of the reality that it reads and interprets. I have always made a sharp distinction between found images and constructed ones. I have always considered myself as part
of those photographers who find images, those who recount and inform you, as in a mirror. I have even discovered fashion photography in the gamble of meetings with
the world.”

photographs by Ferdinando SCIANNA

From 31/08/2019 to 02/02/2020
CASA DEI TRE OCI
Fondamenta delle Zitelle, 43 île Giudecca
30133 VENICE
Italy

Phone : (+39)0412412332
info@treoci.org
www.treoci.org