mheu, Historical Museum of the Urban Environment

The photographer

The photographer Ferdinando Scianna, a member of the Magnum agency, was born in Sicily. Having studied literature and philosophy at the University of Palermo, he published his first photographs at the age of 21, in a book with Leonardo Sciascia, Feste religiose in Sicilia, which won him the Prix Nadar. Scianna then went to Milan and later Paris, where he worked as a photojournalist and fashion photographer (notably for the then unknown Dolce & Gabbana). Sicily and literature have been recurrent themes in his work and one of his books is a portrait of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris held a retrospective of Ferdinando Scianna's work in 2009.