Quotes by
Ferdinando Scianna

I do not think I can change the world with my photographs, but I do firmly believe that a bad picture can make it worse.

I tell them the most obvious thing: photograph what you love and what you hate. But they should tell me how to sneak around in this weird era that I do not really know.

I know my photographs will not change the world, but a bad picture can make it worse.

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.

A photo can happen a few metres from your house or in the farthest away place in the world. You will never know in advance.

A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they do is open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world.

As a photographer I consider myself a reporter. And my fundamental reference is that of my master par excellence, Henri Cartier Bresson, for whom the photographer must aspire to be an invisible witness, who never intervenes to modify the world.

Shadow isn’t just the dialectical moment as opposed to the light, it’s also a psychological moment as opposed to the brightness; there is brightness and there is sorrow too.

I’ve taken a million pictures – 50 were good.

..I learned to take pictures over the years – basically, just by taking them.

Today we all take photos with our phones, but they are background images. Even a selfie is not a self-portrait but a kind of neurosis about a moment of existence that must immediately supplant another, and so on. And we all know what happens when something loses the identity that has determined its success and cultural function. It dies.

..I have walked my entire my life only to take photos. I am like those little dogs who, while walking, have left their poop around the streets. But if you really want to know the truth, then yes, taking pictures has given me a lot of happiness.

I have always made a clear distinction between the images found and those constructed.

Curiosity is, in itself, a form of adventure.