"A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they do is just to 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."

Ferdinando Scianna started taking photographs in the 1960s while studying literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Palermo. Scianna joined Magnum Photos in 1982 and became a full Member in 1989.

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SPAIN. Andalusia. Almeria. 1992. © Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos

For some thirty years, Ferdinando Scianna has been taking photographs in very different places, on every continent, and both by the light of day and at night—but much during the day in fact, as this book on sleepers attests. Whether they are men, women, children, or even animals, these bodies, which pose solely at their own will and which abandon themselves to their dreams, take us on a sort of immobile journey. They are far from the real but firmly anchored in a daily reality. A universal theme in which the private and the imaginative world entwine. As a matter of fact, who has never dreamed of being photographed while sleeping ?

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