"Do not call me master, for heaven’s sake,” says Ferdinando Scianna, welcoming me inside his studio, a cosy ground-floor space in the centre of Milan. “I do not teach anything to anyone. Come in, take a seat.” Scianna has just turned 79. Photography, for him, was an obsession that lasted 60 years. “And it is over today,” he declares. He has not taken pictures for years and says that when young photographers approach him for advice, he wants to ask them for theirs instead.

“I tell them the most obvious thing: photograph what you love and what you hate. But they should tell me how to sneak around in this weird era that I do not really know.” Scianna has taken more than a million photographs and, in his words, the good shots number about 50, including the series on the Roma photographed in the late 90s; the portraits of writers; and one of his most famous photos, a boy running through Capizzi, a small Sicilian village, shadows imprinted on a wall behind him.