"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"

So says Fernandino Scianna as he approaches eighty and decides to leave the world of the camera behind. The first Italian to become a member of Magnum Agency he bequeaths a brilliant legacy of work despite the fact he says that he has only taken fifty photographs worthy of note during his long career.

He received a camera from his father as a present on his sixteenth birthday and, whilst his family wished him to adopt a profession, he saw the camera as a passport out of Sicily where he had been born in a village near Palermo. Although he moved to Milan and started to work as a photographer, and later a journalist, he never fully succeeded in leaving Sicily behind, returning frequently to photograph it's customs, youth and religious ceremonies.

The first of the seventy books he has published during his life, "Feste Religiose in Sicilia", he credits with helping him build his reputation. It looked at religous rituals in Sicily. That was in 1965 when he was twenty one. You can find second hand copies online at over £400 these days. He says " I look at my photos and I ask myself, who took those images? I was too young and ignorant. You know, I learned to take pictures over the years – basically, just by taking them.”

He credits the desire of his generation in the 1960's to "fix the fragments of the world" for his success. However it was a commission by Dolce and Gabbana that brought international recognition and, he would say, the financial independence to do the work he wanted.

Scianna belives that photographers take basically the same photograph many times and so his fashion work was rooted in his matriarchal, religious and traditional background, a theme that never really left him.

His work over the years shows many repeated traits, from the religious themes to the use of the streets but most especially for me his photographs of models shaded with shadows which hints at not only light and dark but a mystery which he has never quite resolved. His fandom of Henri Cartier-Bresson is never far away.

He has an Instagram account (@fernandinosciannaofficial) which is managed by one of his daughters as he does not care for social media and does not have a website, although Magnum mentions him and there is  a brief entry on Wikipedia. “I do not think I can change the world with my photographs, but I do believe that a bad picture can make it worse,” he says. “And the point is that we have too many images. If you eat caviar every day, eventually you will want pasta e fagioli.”  I think he's right, although social media is the method by which people grow reputations these days. It probably shouldn't be.

For now, at 79, he is giving up the camera but not his photographs, working on his archive and selecting photographs for a new book. With over a million t select from and despite feeling he has only ever taken fifty good ones it seems to will to continue is still there....