“One of my first photographs was a portrait of a child, sitting on his father’s shoulders, his chin leaning on his hand on top of his head, the wife almost hugging him, a strong portrait of three heads. But they happened to be on the first row of about half a million people in the Teatro di San Giovanni in Rome on Labour Day, listening to a political speech. So this incredible crowd was rising up behind them.”I gave the film to my friend and he developed it. A few days later, a journalist friend of my father came round for dinner The photo had fallen on the floor He picked it up and asked who had taken it My father said Fabrizio. They got me out of bed and the man said he was writing a series of articles about politics entering the Italian family, and didn’t have any illustrations.

The next day I went to the paper and they bought my photograph.”He did go to university, to do Russian, but almost immediately dropped out. He did a deal with a travel agent and spent six months travelling across the Soviet Union. He came back and began selling reportage pictures to magazines in a piecemeal way. He realised that to earn a living, he had to have commissions. And one of the few areas in which commissions were regularly given was fashion.”I went to the newstand and bought a copy of Italian Vogue and looked up the address. I had no appointment, but I was lucky enough to be seen by a man – now a close friend – who agreed to look through my pictures.

He must have wondered what on earth made me think I could do fashion. He closed my book, turned to me and said: ‘The Vogue woman doesn’t curse, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t fuck.’ ‘Ah,’ I said ‘So, I’m out of here?’And he said yes. But then he started laughing and eventually he sent me to the advertising department. There was one picture they particularly liked and they said, ‘Can you do that for us?’ and I said yes, and that was how I started.”Ferri, by his own admission, has never been among the top fashion photographers. He did advertising for the first few years, then got his editorial break on the Italian fashion glossy Linea. Around that time, during the early Seventies, he lived on the top floor of an old Milanese hotel: 18 beautiful abandoned rooms, which he rented for a pittance and turned into a prototype superstudio, putting up models, renting out rooms to photographers.

It was then that he met Isabella Rossellini for the first time, photographing her as a “personality” wearing Bulgari jewellery for an advertisement. Soon afterwards she turned up with a suitcase and moved in for two years.By 1982 he needed his own studio “I was working a lot, shooting 14 hours a day. So I thought, how should I have my first studio? Should I make a white studio? If I do that, then I’m pretty sure the next day I’ll need a black studio. And what about daylight? And cyclorama? And equipment – strobes, HMIs, I can’t afford them. So I sat down and thought: I am a normal, standard photographer. And if I have this problem, then so must every other photographer who want to invest in his own studio I thought, I can’t make five studios for myself But I can make a superstudio.

So I went to see some real estate people in Milan and we found a building and that’s what we did and it worked.”Before opening in Milan, he gathered his small staff around him and delivered what amounted to a little manifesto. “Don’t think about fashion, don’t think about photographer, don’t think about image.” “I couldn’t afford to have staff fascinated with the models, the glamour of it People who work here are workers You either get it or you don’t They have rights. But we don’t want this place fancy, we don’t want to see design. We want something that’s durable, we want people to come in and look at the structure, not the decoration.