"I have never taken photographs to take photographs, but to try to tell the emotions and thoughts that the reality of the world arouses in me. Chance put me on the road to photography, so I use this tool as well and as honestly as I can. But, especially in recent years, I do it with a certain ironic carelessness about genres: journalism, the essay, the portrait, the single picture, advertising, landscape, architecture, fashion, the family photograph too, all in an amused mixture of genres, in which I do not believe, and with an equally amused but devoted homage to my countless masters. Flaubert wrote that Madame Bovary was himself. I too hope, humbly, that these many images may in some way resemble a self-portrait" (Ferdinando Scianna).