“Not my slaves, but my masters. Pretending to enrich my life, instead they were draining it, they were taking over”. Ferdinando Scianna, undoubtedly a photographer, but also an anthropologist and story-teller, only admits to his addiction on page 53. Cose [Things], his latest book published by Contrasto (€ 45), is a 163-page secret confession. More than 100 photographs, with the cover of an academic thesis, to tell of an obsession, an incurable disease, collecting.

“A photographer like me is basically a compulsive and obsessive collector”, the reporter, fashion, landscape and portrait photographer - the first Italian to have joined the Magnum Photos agency after having met Henri Cartier Bresson - admits on the first line. “A photographer like me sees the world as a multi-faceted mirror which presents images of the most varied range of things, in which they search for instances through which to construct an idea of the world and themselves. In order to understand, and to understand themselves”. He soberly confesses.

A series of photographs of “humble” objects collected during his various travels in Italy and around the world are alternated with images which try to show the sense of ritual, form, and the emotions of the peoples that crowd the planet.

Sicilian horses, terracotta figurines from Ocumichu, Bolivian Ekokos, Neapolitan nativity scene figures, ex-votos from Calabria, Hanoi water puppets, Sardinian masks, the “things” are alternated with the first shots of dances and carts in Palermo (he began there in 1965, with his first book entitled Feste Religiose in Sicilia [Religious celebrations in Sicily] and an essay by Leonardo Sciascia), chilli peppers and ginger in the markets of the Ivory Coast, bulls and bullfighters in Madrid, combs, peoples and perfumery displays.

Cose has been published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia, during the “Brescia Photo Festival 2018”, this year dedicated to photographic collecting with the review “Collections”. The obsessive collections of objects have been presented in a monothematic, philologic and encyclopaedic manner. In the book, and in the spaces of the Brescia museum, Scianna has presented 10 carefully-selected works for the very first time, taken from the cupboards and displays of his home in Milan.

The diary tells the stories, anecdotes (including negotiations), and curious thoughts dedicated to the 10 small objects collected by the Sicilian maestro. The result is an intense and poetic snapshot of how superstitions and beliefs thrive in the chaos of the world. Such as, for example, the ex-voto from Polsi, a small town in the Aspromonte region, where Scianna had been sent as a photo-reporter for Europeo.

During the pilgrimage to the Madonna, which served as a cover for meetings between the heads of the ‘ndrangheta, he recalls the surprise on seeing the beauty of the wax ex-votos, little traditional masterpieces of grace with soft colours and elegant form. Noses, elbows, knees, lungs, ears, fingers, feet and hands. A donkey, a pig, a cow. All pleas for miraculous recoveries. “But above all, a pair of eyes on a plate, in wax, of an indescribable white and light-blue poetry”, wrote Scianna, almost out of professional habit.

“I am very fond of my little innocent masterpieces of traditional taste, which at times can be a little kitsch. I have interiorised this taste to such an extent that it now moves me more than many great works of fine art”. Only a poem by Jorge Luis Borges sums up the familiar uneasiness felt by Scianna towards the hordes of artefacts that, just like photography, remain even after we have long gone.

Things

My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes
The few days left to me will not find time
To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,
A book, and crushed in its pages the withered
Violet, monument to an afternoon
Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,
The mirror in the west where a red sunrise
Blazes its illusion. How many things, Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Serve us like slaves who never say a word,
Blind and so mysteriously reserved.
They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone
non sapran mai che ce ne siamo andati.