Once we have a look at photos of battle, violence and collective trauma we would possibly be expecting to look most effective the horrors of maimed our bodies and the crying souls of the sufferers. However within the pictures of one among Italy’s maximum liked photographers, Letizia Battaglia, you don’t see glamorised photographs of the perpetrators as a result of her pictures aren’t about them, they’re about puts and folks.
The horror is there, however you additionally see plants, a soccer, engaged crowds, and kids on the street. Positive sufficient, a few of these kids grasp weapons as a result of her photos seize the normality that exists across the brutal violence in day by day lifestyles.
Letizia Battaglia used to be born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1935 and used to be a number of the first girls newshounds in Italy. She died in 2022. She travelled the sector together with her photos and received a number of awards for her photo-journalism.
Her paintings is a testomony to a ferocious love of Sicily, a love that went past the digicam and later took her into political place of business to hunt justice and peace for the standard folks whose tales she informed together with her pictures.
An exhibition of her paintings is on at London’s Photographers’ Gallery titled Letizia Battaglia: Lifestyles, Love and Loss of life in Sicily. It presentations her paintings between the Seventies and the Nineties and is the primary main exhibition in the United Kingdom following her dying.
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What captured Battaglia’s eye in the ones years used to be Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian mafia. This used to be the golden age of Cosa Nostra, when the legal organisation used to be conquering house within the international heroin business whilst keeping up a company grip on native and regional contracts. Battaglia captured all sides of lifestyles across the mafia on this duration, from moments of violence and melancholy to depression or even pleasure.
She or one among her assistants would pass to the scene of each main crime in Palermo till in a while ahead of the paper close down in 1990. Via her lens, Battaglia placed on show the sophisticated truth of the mafia in Sicily in stark black and white.
At the one hand, the poverty and the distress of sure spaces of Palermo had been echoing within the brutality of Cosa Nostra. Alternatively, the Sicilian way of living, product of fairs, emotions, spices, faith and ease, appeared to co-exist with the mafia. We now understand how this advanced dating with a town and its folks is vital for mafia organisations’ luck, in Italy and in a foreign country.
(L) Close to the Church of Santa Chiara. The killer’s recreation. Palermo, 1982. (R) At the Mondello seashore. Palermo, 1982.
Archivio Letizia Battaglia/Photographers’ Gallery
Letizia Battaglia’s pictures had been modern as they stripped the mafia of its glamour by way of appearing now not most effective its violence – the murders and the desperation it created – but in addition the banality and the normalisation of all of it. Take the picture within the exhibition the place a memorial for a sufferer is being held the place he fell. His shrouded frame lies splayed within the a ways nook of the body whilst outdated girls take a seat sombrely on plastic chairs.
The Palermo that we see via Battaglia’s eyes is a town in the middle of mafia killings. However, kids are nonetheless operating round and oldsters are nonetheless going to church. Within the Seventies to Nineties, Cosa Nostra’s inside instability and quest for energy made numerous sufferers – from time to time two every week in essentially the most violent sessions.
Mafias want “order” to spice up their benefit and their energy. Order method eliminating enemies and those who discuss an excessive amount of. Crucially, now not all their sufferers had been mafiosi, somewhat the other. A few of the masses killed had been marketers, participants of the church, regulation enforcement, medical doctors, attorneys, newshounds and politicians.
One in particular essential picture on show is of the assassination of Piersanti Mattarella, the president of the Sicilian area on the time and older brother of Sergio Mattarella, who has been President of Italy since 2015. Battaglia used to be one of the most first at the scene to seize Mattarella lifeless in his automobile after being shot in entrance of his spouse and daughter. The case of Mattarella’s homicide remains to be open and stays one Italy’s unsolved crimes. The newest updates on his homicide got here just a few weeks in the past in 2025.
Cosa Nostra additionally killed kids and ladies. Battaglia –– like different L’Ora newshounds –– used to be again and again threatened. The exhibition comprises one extremely frightening letter she won from the mafia asking her to prevent photographing their sufferers.
She didn’t pull away, alternatively, and bravely confirmed how Cosa Nostra used to be manipulating the tradition of Palermo and Sicily. Other folks valued honour and appreciate however Cosa Nostra used those self same values to justify itself as an “honourable society” despite its dishonourable movements. This manipulation in their core price device used to be so deep that Sicilians had been compelled to normalise the mafia’s revenge and excessive violence within the identify of a distorted model of “honour”.
(L) Pass judgement on Giovanni Falcone on the funeral of Normal Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. Palermo, 1982 (R) Cala neighbourhood. The little lady with the ball. Palermo, 1980.
Archivio Letizia Battaglia/Photographers’ Gallery
In Battaglia’s footage no persona is gifted as extra essential than the others. Each and every little bit of Palermo turns into the protagonist of its personal shot. As an example, the little lady with icy black eyes, whom Battaglia photographed in 1980 retaining a soccer in opposition to a wood door, taking a look like she is ready to spit lifestyles out. That picture is as tough because the one among Pass judgement on Giovanni Falcone on the funeral of Normal Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa who used to be killed by way of Cosa Nostra in 1982. Falcone can be killed by way of Cosa Nostra ten years later.
Similtaneously the exhibition in London, any other is appearing Battaglia’s footage in Calabria, Italy. On this exhibition, her footage are displayed outdoor on an extended road in Reggio Calabria that overlooks the Mediterranean sea and Sicily. This exhibition carries a identify that carries a promise: “Endless” (Senza Effective). Unending because the silent revolution of Battaglia’s footage, for Sicily, for Italy, and for the anti-mafia motion.
Letizia Battaglia: Lifestyles, Love and Loss of life in Sicily is on at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, till February 23
