Too great the fascination, too dangerous the temptation. I even felt I needed to look for excuses to accept the proposal. In Venice, a small place, limited in extent: perhaps my legs would be up to it. The truth is that the idea had piqued my curiosity, which is what has always been my motivation in this profession.I know nothing about the Jewish world, although it has always attracted me. Because of my many friends, all interesting and complicated. The great writers, the wonderful musicians, all those fantastic photographers. And then in recent years I have not done much photography.
Mostly I have been writing things to go with my pictures. This has brought me pleasure and satisfaction. But I am a photographer, so that my own little attempt to be happy involves above all that tension of the body, the eyes, the mind and the heart which can only be relieved by walking around with a camera in my hand, seeking, waiting for those instants of meaning and glimpses of form that on very rare occasions reveal the world and myself.
But as soon as I accepted the assignment I fell prey to the anxiety I am so familiar with after fifty years on the job and which has never gone away. And if I can’t do it? That place is a theater in which extraordinary and terrible things have been happening for half a millennium. I know that such places never stop telling stories, even after centuries have passed. But if I was unable to hear those voices, to see in the incidental complexity and contradictory character of the present day the images that contain a trace of that eventful history?
For some time now, however, I have learned that the only answer to this sense of inadequacy is the humility of work, tenacity, constant focus. Sinking into the place, mingling with the people and continuing, hour after hour, day after day, to collect pebbles with which to build your house. Hoping for luck.While pondering over whether to write this brief comment or not I was reading a book of interviews with Joseph Brodsky, one of my favorite contemporary poets and Jewish himself, even though he did not appear to care much for this label, or for any other.
A regret too, for me, over a meeting that never took place, planned just a short time before he died, with his friend Michail Baryshnikov. An illuminating and irritating book, as are all of Brodsky’s interviews.In it I found this statement: “On the other hand, the greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.Often things don’t work out, and the distress is great. But hardship is part of the enterprise, on which, to tell the truth, you never venture for pleasure. The pleasure comes at the end, when we succeed in the task.”
Ferdinando Scianna
Ferdinando Scianna is a Magnum Photographer, recipient of the 1966 Prix Nadar and has published over 20 photography books during his career.
