Letizia Battaglia : The Sicilian Photographer Who Fought the Mafia

 

“You seem like such a nice girl,” Letizia kept faxing back to me—always evasive and never, ever answering my usually welcome question: “Are you interested in working with me on a book for Aperture?”
 
Letizia Battaglia died on April 13, 2022, in Cefalù, near Palermo, Italy. She was eighty-seven. I first saw Letizia’s work exposing the Mafia’s oppressive, unrelentingly brutal grip on her native Sicily while working at Aperture Foundation, editing various issues of their quarterly publication, as well as books. At this time, the early to mid-1990s, Letizia was little known in the United States outside photojournalistic circles. In 1985, she had won the coveted W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant for humanistic photography, sharing it with Donna Ferrato—the first time two winners had been named. Then, in May 1986, the New York Times Magazine, in an article titled “Sicily and the Mafia,” published a selection of Letizia’s and Franco Zecchin’s images. Some of the most iconic became forever embedded in the mind’s eye of many—although both photographers were still relatively unknown.

 
When I decided to devote an issue of Aperture to Italian photography, Immagini Italiane (1993), we included Letizia’s work, accompanied by an interview with the wonderful Italian editor and writer Giovanna Calvenzi, who in 2010 would author Letizia Battaglia: Sulle ferite dei suoi sogni (On the wounds of her dreams). I thought Letizia was pleased, and I was fairly certain she had gone to see and liked the traveling exhibition we did in conjunction with the issue in Venice, where it opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, or in Naples, where it was presented at Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes. So why wasn’t she responding “yes” to my book entreaty, or at least acknowledging the question? This was her M.O., I would come to learn, but at the time I was flummoxed—it had become personal.
 
So, in 1994, I took the long way to Naples, where I had a project, and stopped in Palermo. Letizia saw me for maybe an hour. She showed me not one photograph. We sat in her home, in Palermo’s wonderful old center (I would soon learn that she and others helped to save it from Mafia-plotted destruction), and we shared an espresso together. Still, when I left, I was frustrated and bewildered, not to mention empty-handed. She had promised to send me a package. Yeah, sure: the check was in the mail.
 
But, wow—I was nonetheless blown away by her. Her fierce intensity felt almost feral. The proverbial force of nature and then some. And not only as a photographer  but also as a publisher, Green Party member with the Palermo city council, ecological activist, and defender of women’s and of human rights. We spoke about women, we spoke about justice, she asked me personal questions—not my forte, as I’m so private, but she was like truth serum. I soon understood I was being tested. That she was naturally suspicious. But our conversation was somehow instantly intimate. From that moment on, there was this extraordinary, powerful woman in my life who declared herself my sister, who could get annoyed with me, and who demanded a kind of complicity.
 
That package bursting with prints, most with handwritten Italian captions scribbled on the backs, arrived two weeks later. Her work took my breath away, as it did for Aperture’s director and publisher at the time, Michael Hoffman. It wasn’t just the photographs’ visual power, or Letizia’s clear commitment to bearing witness to the horrific violence plaguing her city, especially as it affected women and children. It was her all-in engagement, her toughness, her advocacy, her profound sense of justice. Her passion.

 
And so our story began, as she would only agree to collaborate on the book if I would write the accompanying essay about her that I had asserted was crucial. In this way, I would be invested not just as the book’s editor, but also as the person to whom she would tell her story in words. Of course, I accepted her challenge. Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom—Photographs of Sicily was published by Aperture in 1999. I have chosen to quote many of her words from the book here, adding context when useful, as Letizia spoke so ardently and persuasively about what mattered to her.
 
Letizia was born in Palermo on March 5, 1935. Her father was in the navy and they moved around Italy. She spent much of her childhood in Trieste, in the north, and was ten when her family moved back to Palermo. At first she sought freedom by marrying an older man, and with him she had three daughters: Cinzia, Shobha (also a photographer), and Patrizia. But she became desperately unhappy and claustrophobic. She credited the Freudian psychoanalyst Francesco Corrao with helping her to understand that she was strong, telling her, “You can make your own peace, your own equilibrium. You can rebuild your life and save yourself.”
 
This gave her the strength to leave her husband in 1971, at age thirty-six. She went to Milan and began writing for a newspaper there, while also continuing to write for the left-wing Sicilian daily newspaper L’Ora, as she had done for the previous two years. She had always wanted to be a writer, to tell stories. She soon realized that she’d have more success selling her articles if they were accompanied by images, and so she began making photographs. Very quickly, she just wanted to take pictures. After she had done a small photographic job for L’Ora, the paper asked her to return to Palermo as its director of photography, and she became a full-time photographer. “I think that my life truly began with my camera,” she told me. “I mean my freedom as a person, my voice.” Diane Arbus, Josef Koudelka, Mary Ellen Mark, and Eugene Richards were the photographers whose work she especially admired.

 
In 1975, she traveled to Venice to see Jerzy Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum Figuris and met members of his Theatre of Participation. Eventually she ended up working with them, and that’s where she met the twenty-two-year-old Franco Zecchin, who would become her partner in work and life over the next two decades. During our conversations, which took place between 1996 and 1998, she described how their “beautiful story” began:
 
“We spent our first . . . what would you call it . . . encounter on a floor full of dry leaves, because Grotowski was pushing to create things with nature. . . . Bit by bit, we got down in the leaves and began to know each other. After that, I returned to Palermo, and Franco returned to Milan—but then he came to Palermo and stayed for nineteen years. We experienced some very dramatic things together, and accomplished many positive things as well, including our work against the Mafia. Franco was not Sicilian, so it was different for him. He completely understood, but it was more of an intellectual fight for him, whereas for me it was my home, my people, who were so threatened. Besides, I am incapable of elaborating on an intellectual idea with the camera. I live life with the camera. The camera is like a piece of my heart, an extension of my intuition, my sensitivity. . . .
 
I was bare-handed, except for my camera, against them with all of their weapons. I took pictures of everything. Suddenly I had an archive of blood. An archive of pain, of desperation, of terror, of young people on drugs, of young widows, of trials and arrests. There in my house, Franco Zecchin and I were surrounded by the dead, the murdered. It was like being in the middle of a revolution. I was so afraid.”
 
One of Letizia’s and Zecchin’s most provocative and risky actions was displaying large-scale prints of their images of Mafia victims in Corleone’s main piazza. Letizia was desperate for her fellow Sicilians to truly understand the Mafia’s barbarity, and to speak up and out against them, despite her understandable fear. The acute brilliance of her reportage was always intertwined heart and soul with her activism.

 
Letizia’s own performative nature and instinct to take it to the streets eventually led her to enter politics. She met Mayor Leoluca Orlando when she was first elected to Palermo’s Municipal Council in 1985; although they were not predisposed toward working together, they soon completely accepted, trusted, and respected each other—especially once Letizia understood that he was “ferociously anti-Mafia, and also much more progressive than I was at the time on issues of the environment, for example.” They ultimately became close collaborators and friends, and Orlando poetically expressed his appreciation for Letizia’s heart, mind, and willfulness in a letter to her, written for our book.
 
About her work in politics, Letizia told me:
 
“When I stopped taking pictures and entered politics—first as municipal councilwoman, then as regional deputy, and lastly as municipal councilwoman again—I was afraid I had betrayed photography, and maybe even the struggle, since I had felt that taking pictures was my only weapon. But then I realized that the same motivation lies behind my photography and my politics, the same will to combat, to stay on the front line. Working in a different way, I could accomplish different things. So, despite many difficult times, we continued into the eighties with our politics, photography, publishing, meetings, and anti-Mafia demonstrations. And then came those wonderful men who gave us such hope—Judge Giovanni Falcone, Judge Paolo Borsellino—prosecutors who were good and brave; and who then, in 1992, were murdered.”
 
Another contributor to the book Passion, Justice, Freedom was Magistrate Roberto Scarpinato, who at the time was prosecuting Italy’s ex–prime minister Giulio Andreotti for collusion with the Mafia—and using one of Letizia’s photographs as evidence. Also writing for our book and discussing this image, along with her work in general, was journalist Alexander Stille, author of Excellent Cadavers (1995), which insightfully chronicles the violence and workings of the Sicilian Mafia in light of the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino. In 2005, when Marco Turco turned Excellent Cadavers into a film, Letizia’s commanding presence throughout was electrifying.
 
Letizia’s approach was one of advocacy and empowerment, especially of women, on the most human and humane level. In Palermo she started a women’s theater project, and when she began her publishing house the initial idea was to give women (although not exclusively women) a place to be heard, a platform. The principal motivation for these books was desperation after the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, but Edizioni della battaglia soon embraced talented voices and addressed the struggle for human rights worldwide. In time, Mayor Orlando assigned her a counseling position to work with prisoners in Palermo: “It’s necessary,” she told me, “to work for justice but also to help those who have made mistakes to transform their lives.”  She and Zecchin also set up a photography school and volunteered in the psychiatric hospital in Palermo, working with the patients. Around 2013, Letizia told me about the photography center she had conceived for Palermo: Il Centro Internazionale di Fotografia—Cantieri culturali alla Zisa. She asked if I’d curate one of the first exhibitions; she wanted a show of American women photographers. And, would I please include Mary Ellen Mark? Mary Ellen, who died in 2015, consented without hesitation. “For Letizia.”
 

In the summer of 2015, I received an email from Letizia further describing the center. Mayor Orlando had provided funding to restore the building, “but there will be no money for anything else. . . . I need the help of many,” she wrote. “I need photographers who will give me photographs to exhibit at no cost. Everyone must know that I have much respect for the photographs and photographers. This is a heroic operation, because it was born in Palermo, still the powerful city of the Mafia. Whoever helps me has to do it by faith.”
 
I sent a rough translation to Nina Berman, Lynsey Addario, Donna Ferrato, Graciela Iturbide, Mary Ellen Mark’s studio, Susan Meiselas, Sylvia Plachy, and Stephanie Sinclair. These remarkable photographers joined forces with me (as did designer Yolanda Cuomo and translator Meg Shore). The 2018 show, Donne Fotografano Donne (Women Photograph Women), was born. Letizia was profoundly moved by their generosity of spirit and the support of her community. She understood that this exhibition came about because of the woman and photographer we all understood her to be. This spring, Mayor Orlando announced that the Palermo photography center would be renamed in her honor.
 
The Sicilian Photographer Who Fought the Mafia :  An impassioned activist and fearless documentarian, Letizia Battaglia lived by the heart and the camera. By Melissa Harris. Aperture , May 5, 2022. 

When Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia passed away on April 13, 2022, the biggest shock among those of us who have written about her was that she didn’t die at the hands of the Mafia.

 
For nearly five decades she fearlessly fought the criminal enterprise. Armed with her 35mm camera, she publicized the Sicilian Mafia’s reign of terror with her photographs of the bullet-riddled bodies of public servants, innocent bystanders and mafiosi. She later worked as a politician and local activist to wrest Palermo’s streets and piazzas from the Mafia’s grip.
 
Exposing the Mafia’s culture of death
 
Battaglia earned international acclaim for her photographs of Sicily – images that captured the island’s beauty, poverty, spirit and, perhaps most famously, violence.
 
Her first years working as a photojournalist at Palermo’s daily newspaper, L’Ora, coincided with the first Mafia murders of public figures in the 1970s and the years of the Second Mafia War in the 1980s, which was simply known as “the slaughter.”
 
The struggle over power and profits pitted the rural clan of Corleone, led by Salvatore Riina, against key clans operating in Palermo, the capital of Sicily. During the conflict, machine gun fire and car bomb explosions became commonplace in Palermo and outlying cities.
 
The politicians in Rome responded to the national crisis by asking General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to become the prefect of Palermo. After spending four months restoring order, Dalla Chiesa, his wife, Emanuela Setti Carraro, and police bodyguard Domenico Russo were murdered in a spray of machine-gun fire on September 3, 1982 – what became known as the Via Carini Massacre. Dalla Chiesa’s death, along with hits on police chiefs, public prosecutors and investigators, left honest citizens feeling hopeless and abandoned.
 
Some days Battaglia would rush from one city to another to photograph several dead bodies – of mafiosi, judges, police, political figures and journalists – “so much blood,” she later recalled.
 
Mafia murders became so commonplace – some 600 between 1981 and 1983 alone – that she sometimes came upon crime scenes by chance.
 
Such was the case with her famous photograph of the corpse of Piersanti Mattarella, the former president of the Region of Sicily. On Jan. 6, 1980, while riding in the car with her daughter and fellow photojournalist Franco Zecchin, Battaglia saw a small group of people gathering around a car. She spontaneously snapped shots from the car window, capturing Sergio Mattarella, the current President of Italy, as he attempted to help his brother, who had been shot in an ambush.
 
 
The Palermo Spring
 
Battaglia’s photographs of Mafia violence were published regularly on the front page of L’Ora. She also displayed large format prints of them at pop-up exhibits that she and Zecchin organized in downtown Palermo and local schools.
 
In doing so, she forced people to face what they had disavowed: that the Mafia existed, and that it killed.
 
Of course, most Sicilians had been aware of the crime organization’s influence. They watched the public parks become overrun by drug dealers, and tiptoed around used syringes dotting the sandy beaches. Some 80% of Palermo businesses regularly paid the “pizzo,” or money demanded by the Mafia to protect businesses from the Mafia’s own violence.
 
But Battaglia’s images of bloodshed made it impossible to continue turning a blind eye, and a shift gradually occurred.
 
Beginning in 1983, an anti-Mafia pool of prosecutors and uncompromised police officers started arresting numerous Mafia members. Over 450 of them were eventually put on trial in the famous Maxi-trial, which began in 1986.
 
With public confidence in the justice system bolstered, a social, cultural and political revolution took place between 1985 and 1990. Everyday people and new members of the city council started directly confronting the Mafia and working to loosen its grip on the region. It became known as the “Palermo Spring,” and Battaglia was a driving force behind it.
 
In 1985, she was elected as a council member. Together with the mayor, Leoluca Orlando, who appointed her Commissioner for Gardens and Public Life, Battaglia worked to stop the Mafia’s decadeslong sacking of Palermo. Mafia leaders and their political allies had let schools, historic palazzos and gardens fall into disrepair, with the intent of eventually razing the downtown neighborhoods and making windfall profits in reconstruction.
 
Battaglia was driven by the conviction that providing all citizens free access to spectacular gardens, parks, beaches and historical sites was essential for creating a culture of respect and appreciation for Palermo and its heritage. Through her projects to make Palermo more beautiful and livable, Battaglia reclaimed Mafia-controlled spaces block by block. She worked with fellow members of the city council on undertakings such as removing abandoned cars, creating a downtown pedestrian mall and restoring public gardens to their original beauty.
 
On streets and in piazzas controlled by clan bosses, where a glance or wrong word can represent an offense worthy of violent retaliation, Battaglia’s acts directly challenged the bosses. But public support soon coalesced behind Battaglia and her allies.
 
One instance is especially memorable. After having mountains of garbage hauled away from the beach near Foro Italica near the Kalsa neighborhood, which was famous for its high concentration of powerful mafiosi, she had some benches for enjoying the view bolted into the cement. The next day they were gone.
 
Journalist Antonio Roccuzzo was with Battaglia. He recalled how she went straight to the neighborhood and shouted, “I know who you are. The benches don’t belong to you. They belong to everyone. If all of you don’t put them back within the hour, I’m going to raise hell!”
 
An hour later, the benches were bolted back in place.
 
Keeping an invisible Mafia in the public eye
 
In 1992 and 1993, a series of bombings took the lives of Judges Giovanni Falcone, renowned architect of the Maxi-trial; Francesca Morvillo, a prosecutor in the juvenile court of Palermo and his wife; and Paolo Borsellino, who had worked closely with Falcone and investigated his murder. Bodyguards and bystanders in Sicily, Rome, Milan and Florence also perished.
 
With these bombings, known as the “strategy of massacres,” the Mafia attacked the state’s symbols of justice, government, finance and culture. Their goal was to intimidate politicians into weakening laws against organized crime.
 
However, the violence elicited even more public backlash, and the criminal organization soon adopted the strategy of going underground and quietly carrying on its diversified criminal activities. This shift marked a departure from spectacular bombings, brazen assassinations and shootouts in city streets.
 
Yet the menace of the Mafia still remains. Their murder victims now die mostly by “lupara bianca” – with any trace of their bodies destroyed by fire or acid.
 
In the absence of visible evidence, Battaglia’s shots documenting Mafia bloodshed and bereavement continue doing the work of keeping the ramifications of Mafia violence in the public eye.

 
These painful images have also become vehicles for expressing hope. In a project Battaglia began in 2004, known as “Rielaborazioni” – or “Re-elaborations” – she takes the original images of violent deaths and overlays symbols and signs of renewal, often through vibrant female figures. In her reconfiguration of her iconic picture of Falcone at Dalla Chiesa’s funeral in 1982, a youthful woman appears in the foreground, bathed in water spraying from a fountain.
 
In death, as in life, Battaglia’s impassioned commitment to create beauty and hope in her beloved Palermo survives. You can see it on the streets of a city reborn, and on the faces of its honest, well-meaning citizens.
 
 
The photographer who fought the Sicilian Mafia for five decades. By  Robin Pickering-Iazzi. The Conversation, May 2, 2022. 

  Letizia Battaglia, a Sicilian photojournalist who risked her life to document the brutal crimes of her Italian island’s notorious Cosa Nostra Mafia, died April 13 in Cefalù, near the Sicilian capital of Palermo, her hometown. She was 87.

The Associated Press reported her death, citing an announcement by officials including Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando, her longtime friend. The cause was not immediately available.

Ms. Battaglia, a onetime reporter who started taking photographs only in 1974, shortly before her 40th birthday, focused her lens on the bloody feuds between the various Cosa Nostra crime families in Sicily, including the Corleone clan from the small town of that name outside Palermo.

Although Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel “The Godfather” about Don Vito Corleone and the subsequent Francis Ford Coppola “Godfather” movies were fictionalized, the Corleonesi were real Mafiosi in Sicily, named after their town rather than a family. (The grandparents of actor Al Pacino, who starred in the “Godfather” films, were from Corleone.)

Ms. Battaglia covered the inter-family feuds mostly by photographing the bodies of their victims. These included rival Mafiosi, corrupt politicians, businessmen and often innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.

In 1979, well aware that she was putting her life on the line, Ms. Battaglia traveled to Corleone and exhibited giant prints of her photographs of Mafia victims in the main square. Most locals stayed away, adhering to the Mafia’s famous omertà, or code of silence.

Easily recognizable by her punky hair, which she dyed in colors including pink and purple even later in life, Ms. Battaglia buzzed through the streets and alleyways of Palermo on an Italian Vespa motor scooter, her Leica dangling from her neck, a cigarette between her lips

.
She was often the first person after police officers to arrive at crime scenes, thanks to a scanner tuned to police radio frequencies. She said police officers were disarmed by her presence and allowed her to get “up close and personal” images, often of corpses lying in pools of blood.

She was one of the first female photographers to work for an Italian newspaper when she first picked up a camera in 1974 for the left-wing daily L’Ora in Palermo. In the following years, she shot around 600,000 images, which she called her “archive of blood.” Never moving to color film, she insisted that her black and white images, with skillful use of light and shadow, were more effective than color in portraying the blood and death caused by the Mafia.

“When you are shooting the dead, using black and white is a way to be delicate, respectful,” she once told London’s Guardian newspaper. “It creates its own silence and silence was very important for me.”
One of her best-known images shows Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s current president, pulling the body of his brother Piersanti, a Sicilian politician, riddled with bullets, out of a car in Palermo in 1980. Another shows a young boy pretending to be a Mafia hit man, pointing a toy gun at passersby while wearing a nylon stocking to disguise his face, a common practice at the time.

She wanted to show how the Mafia’s deep-rooted influence affected ordinary Sicilian society, especially the youth. Her photographs, often first published in L’Ora and picked up by global photo agencies, gradually turned Sicilians against organized crime by showing them that the Mafiosi were not only killing each other but affecting, and sometimes even killing innocent people on their island.

Ms. Battaglia’s images were a major influence on what became known as the Palermo Spring in the late 1980s, when many Sicilians ditched the omertà and took to the streets to denounce the violence of the feuding clans. Ms. Battaglia and Orlando, Palermo’s longtime mayor, were at the forefront of the demonstrations.

Calling her photos “indictments,” Ms. Battaglia once told the German press agency DPA, “I am a messenger of resistance, resistance against violence, corruption, poverty, against moral and political chaos.”

In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, she called the Mafia’s reign of terror in the 1980s the “terrible years. You no longer knew who your friends or enemies were. In the morning, you came out of the house and did not know if you’d come back in the evening. The bosses could blow my head off, any second.

“When the police stopped [the Mafiosi], I approached them, as close as possible, to photograph them, in their handcuffs,” Ms. Battaglia said. “I wanted the bosses to look me in my eyes, even at the cost of spitting on my face.”

The Guardian quoted her as saying that when she attended funerals of Mafiosi, she would cough every time she took a photograph, “so that the click of my shutter could not be heard.” Unbeknown to her, Sicilian police sometimes used her funeral images to identify other Mafiosi and their political and business associates.

Letizia Battaglia was born in Palermo on March 5, 1935, and moved with her parents to northern Italy as a child. She said her childhood was “happy and carefree” until a man exposed himself to her in the street. Her father then demanded that she stay at home, a restriction that led to her eloping at 16 with an older man, Ignazio Stagnitta.

She had three daughters by the time she was in her mid-20s before leaving her husband in 1971 and moving to Milan to work as a journalist.

In Milan, she met Franco Zecchin, a photographer and fellow anti-Mafia activist. They moved to Ms. Battaglia’s native Sicily in 1974, where she was hired by L’Ora. Inspired by the work of American photographer Diane Arbus, Ms. Battaglia first picked up a camera at age 39.

“With this in my hand,” she recalled in a 2019 interview with the Guardian, “I can take on the world.”
One of her first photos for L’Ora was of a Mafioso who had been executed by a rival clan, spread-eagled beneath an olive tree in rural Sicily. Ms. Battaglia told the Guardian in 2019 that she could still recall the smell of that day 45 years later.

“Everyone is equal in death,” she said. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days. Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”

She hung up her Leica in 1992 after two anti-Mafia judges were murdered. She told friends she was shocked and exhausted by the violence, which never seemed to end.

“Photography changes nothing,” she told the Guardian. “Violence continues, poverty continues, children are still being killed in stupid wars.”

British filmmaker Kim Longinotto told Ms. Battaglia’s story in a 2019 documentary, “Shooting the Mafia,” which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

Survivors include her daughter Shobha Battaglia, herself a well-known photographer and twice winner of a World Press Photo award.

After retiring as a photojournalist, Ms. Battaglia went on to serve as a Green party member with the Palermo city council and the Sicilian regional assembly. Those years were “the worst part of my life, the most humiliating,” she told London’s Sunday Times in 2019. “I didn’t do anything and they paid me a fortune. Everything was decided outside and the Mafia was still there.”

Letizia Battaglia, photographer of Sicilian underworld, dies at 87. By Phil Davison. The Washington Post  , April 16, 2022

Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers.

 
Letizia Battaglia can still remember the first corpse she photographed: a man lying beneath an olive tree in a field in rural Sicily. It remains a viscerally unsettling image, made all the more so by its telling details: the dead man’s shoeless left foot, the resigned gaze of the policeman guarding the body, the olive leaves hanging low over the spreadeagled torso. The fact that he was a mafioso murdered in a local feud is, insists Battaglia, neither here nor there. “Everyone,” she says quietly, “is equal in death.”
 
What has stayed with her, over 40 years later, is the smell that hung in the summer air that day and was carried on the breeze. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days,” she says, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”
 
We are sitting at a table in Battaglia’s modest flat in central Palermo, her home town, talking about Sicily’s bloody past – what the Italians call “the years of lead”. Now 84, her hair dyed pink as if in defiance of old age, Battaglia is an icon in her native city, the woman who captured the atmosphere of death like no other photographer throughout the dark days of the 1970s and 1980s.
 
Still passionately engaged in the social and political life of the city, she speaks about what she once called her “archive of blood” with a mixture of stoicism, anger and regret. “Photography changes nothing,” she says at one point. “Violence continues, poverty continues, children are still being killed in stupid wars.”
 
Yet Battaglia’s photographs were evidence that held the mafia to account: two of her images were crucial in proving former prime minister Giulio Andreotti’s links to organised crime, as they showed him with an important mafioso, Nino Salvo, whom he had denied knowing. Later, she will take me to see her latest venture, the grandly titled International Centre of Photography, a gallery and creative hub on a former industrial site on the edge of the city.
 
In one room, assistants are hanging a selection of her early work, originally published in Palermo’s left-wing newspaper, L’Ora. One striking photograph shows several mafiosa sitting in a row in a courtroom. The youngest is staring arrogantly at her camera, his finger pointed towards his mouth. “He is saying to me, ‘I will blow your brains out,’” says Battaglia, who lived with regular death threats for two decades.
 
 “Letizia’s pictures confronted the mafia,” says Kim Longinotto, director of an extraordinary new film about Battaglia. “She faced up to the fear they instilled. She refused to be afraid at a time when it could have cost her her life.” Using Battaglia’s images alongside news footage and scenes from classic black and white Italian realist films, Shooting the Mafia is, among other things, a sustained riposte to romanticised Hollywood portrayals of the mafia.
 
“They called themselves men of honour,” says Longinotto. “But, as her photographs show, there was nothing honourable in what they did. Many of those they killed were young activists, trade unionists, truly honourable people challenging corrupt politicians.”
 
In one revealing sequence from the 1980s, Battaglia and her friends stage an impromptu exhibition of her photographs in the village of Corleone, a mafia stronghold that has produced several bosses. The locals initially stare at them out of curiosity then wander away in silence. “It was an act of incredible bravery and defiance.” says Longinotto. “Letizia was forcing them to look directly at what the mafia were doing, but the people were afraid even to be seen looking at the photographs. That is how deep the fear ran.”

 
Battaglia’s rebellious spirit found its true expression in photography. Raised in postwar Palermo, save for a few years when her family relocated to Trieste, she reacted against her strict upbringing by running away to marry a rich older man when she was just 16. Against the odds, the marriage lasted over 20 years and produced three children, whom she took with her when she finally returned to Sicily.
 
Her ambition was to be a writer, but her fledgling journalistic career came to an abrupt end when she first picked up a camera at the age of 40. “I thought, ‘With this in my hand, I can take on the world,’” she says, her eyes lighting up. “Suddenly, I no longer needed kisses or caresses. Instead, I had this confidence, this independence. But it was not just about expressing myself. With the camera, I could also express the inquietude of the world.”
 

When I suggest that she is, at heart, a romantic, she bridles and fixes me with a fierce stare. “No! Photography is not a romantic thing for me. It is not so banal. To create a truly great photograph, you have to work hard and be free. A good photographer needs to be inside the photograph somehow so that the viewer can feel their presence.”
 
Entirely self-taught, she did not realise how powerful her photographs were until years after she took them. “No one told me they were good, but I could feel something. The men photographers kept me apart, they did not invite me to their gatherings and I did not care. It was only in retrospect that I realised I was a storyteller who used images instead of words.”
 
The story she told remains one of the most compellingly powerful in photography’s history. But alongside the horror, there is a strange kind of formal beauty that rests in her intuitive grasp of composition and use of shadow and light. “When you are shooting the dead, using black and white is a way to be delicate, respectful. It creates its own silence and silence was very important for me.”
 
A bleak photograph from 1982 is a case in point: three bodies lie slumped over chairs in a nondescript room, a sex worker and two of her clients, all killed for using heroin that was not supplied by the mafia. “It was such a small room,” she says, “and when I arrived it was full of people: policemen, doctors, magistrates. I had to wait there until, one by one, they left and I was alone with the bodies. It took an eternity, but I had to be alone out of respect for the dead.”

 
There are silence and beauty too in her heartbreaking portrait of Rosario Schifani, which was taken at the funeral of her husband, a bodyguard killed in a car bomb that targeted Battaglia’s friend Giovanni Falcone, a fearless anti-Mafia judge. His death, and that of his associate Paolo Borsellino the same year, caused Battaglia to retreat from the world for a time.
 
“I was in despair,” she says, looking pained. “There were too many dead people. Falcone and Borsellino were symbols of hope, of change, but I loved them as people. It was too much for me. I wanted to die. I had to rebuild myself, but it was so hard, so painful.”
 
At moments like this, one catches a glimpse of the heavy price Battaglia paid for her bravery and commitment. Things have changed for the better, she says, but the Mafia remain a malign invisible force in international crime and politics. Her energies are directed elsewhere these days. She is working on an extended project called Nude Palermo. “It is people of every age and gender – and now, finally, they are not afraid to show themselves. It is not sexy, it is pride, it is strength. Women are freer inside now, they do not wait for the man’s permission.”
 
She smiles and lights another cigarette. “I am optimistic despite all I have seen,” she says, blowing smoke into the air, “I have to be. Not for me, but for the young people. I can see that they need hope and I have to give it to them. Politics shows them only hate. I can show them beauty. My heart has not hardened with age. Always, there is hope, but you must fight for it.”
 
Archive of blood: how photographer Letizia Battaglia shot the mafia and lived. By Sean O’Hagan. The Guardian, November 27, 2019. 

Letizia Battaglia, Italy’s most famous female photojournalist, has developed all of her rolls of film but one. Shot in 1987, the photos show the corpse of a 10-year-old boy, Claudio, who had been killed by the mafia in Palermo.

 
It was a time of war. The Sicilian mafia, known as Cosa Nostra, was leaving bullet-ridden bodies in the streets and assassinating prosecutors with car bombs. Battaglia  of corpses, building a bloody archive in black and white that showed Sicily’s worst face to the world.
 
Thirty years have passed since Battaglia photographed the boy, killed because he had witnessed a murder, and the world around her has changed. Tourism has regenerated Palermo and brought it back from the depths. Most of the Cosa Nostra bosses are in prison and its killers have stopped shooting up the city. Battaglia has changed too. Now, at 82, she is trying to leave behind the horror of those years and searching for innocence and beauty.
 
Her new subject is a 10-year-old girl, the same age as murderedClaudio, in a work called The Beauty of Greta. “This project, in a way, begins from that film roll that was never developed, of the murdered child, that I never found the courage to print,” she said.
 
“The age of 10 is the age of innocence. For me, innocence is synonymous with beauty. Being 10 years old is a magical moment in life. At that age, we are dreaming, we dream of a wonderful future, a future that the mafia, in Sicily, has removed from thousands of people.”
 
Battaglia said it was the impact of Claudio’s murder that decades later had led her to ditch her celebrated noir style. “The constant sight, every day, of all those dead makes you crazy. I have photographed hundreds of them in my life.

 
 “Yet the death of that innocent child, killed because he had witnessed a murder, marked me forever. They took away the right to life. The right to dream. That is why, from the destruction of life, I decided to move on to the construction of life. From horror to beauty.”
 
 Battaglia, who is resuming work after a break of nearly 10 years, lives in the historic centre of Palermo with her 13-year-old dog, Pippo, and has recently agreed to manage a new international photography centre opening in September. Her dream is to bring the British photographer Richard Billingham to Sicily. “For me, he remains the best in the world,” she said.
 
It is far removed from the late 70s, when a war between the mafia families in and around Palermo led to hundreds of deaths. The Corleone clan decided to conquer the city by killing its rivals, along with dozens of police officers, judges and politicians who were trying to stop that war.
 
Riding a Vespa and armed only with her Leica camera, Battaglia scoured the alleys of Palermo, day and night. She was always the first on the scene of the crime, often even before police and relatives.
 
“They were terrible years,” Battaglia said, slowly blowing out cigarette smoke. “You no longer knew who your friends or enemies were. In the morning, you came out of the house and did not know if you’d come back in the evening. The bosses could blow my head off, any second.

 
“When the police stopped them, I approached them, as close as possible, to photograph them, in their handcuffs. I wanted the bosses to look me in my eyes, even at the cost of spitting on my face. That was also a way for me to challenge the mafia.”
 
More than 4,000 mafiosi have been arrested in Sicily since the 1980s. And maybe it’s not a coincidence if Palermo, free from bullets, seems to have been born again. The city was recently named 2018 Italian capital of culture and next year it will host Manifesta, Europe’s most important biennial of contemporary art. Palermo was last year included on the Unesco world heritage list.“But the fight is not over,” Battaglia said. “It’s true, the mafia no longer shoots, but you must not lower your guard. You can also continue to fight the mafia, with beauty,” she said. “Beauty makes us understand what we might lose again.’’
 
From mafia murders to innocent beauty: Letizia Battaglia’s Palermo portfolio. By Lorenzo Tondo. The Guardian, June 2, 2017. 

 

“We stop time,” says Letizia Battaglia of her profession, photography. “If you go back to the great artists of previous centuries, theirs was a magnificent, fantastic interpretation. But it wasn’t reality.”

 Unfortunately for many of her subjects, time stopped just before she got to them. If you have ever been haunted by a photograph of a Mafia killing in Sicily, it is a fair bet that Ms. Battaglia took the picture.
The Maxxi, Italy’s national contemporary art museum in Rome, has gathered more than 300 photographs, contact sheets and contemporary prints for a retrospective of Ms. Battaglia’s work that opens on Nov. 24.

“Her photography is universal,” says Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, one of the show’s three curators. “It recounts humanity with the force and commitment of a work of art. It goes beyond the specific context of Sicily at a particular time to speak to other cultures that have had similar experiences and can identify with people who are suffering, caught between life and death.”
 
One of the exhibition’s most striking aspects is how quickly Ms. Battaglia, now 81 years old, got to the scene of the killings that she recorded—sometimes before police cordoned off the area or draped a sheet over the corpse.
 
Visitors to the Maxxi will first encounter photos of plays that she directed and experimental videos that she produced, as well as her photos of protests in 1970s Milan and photographic portraits of the poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The museum also will show samples from her most ambitious project: a photographic record of the patients at a psychiatric hospital in Palermo, Sicily, which she visited over a decade.
 
In the second of the two sections of the exhibit, large-format reproductions of 120 of Ms. Battaglia’s most striking images hang from the ceiling. Some are predictable, with victims stretched on the ground or slumped in cars, their windows shattered by gunfire. In another photo, a man lies face down next to a pool of blood, his shirt lifted to his shoulders to reveal a large tattoo of Jesus crowned with thorns.
Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers.

 
Perhaps the most poignant captures the aftermath of a triple homicide. The victims included a prostitute who had been trading drugs without the Mafia’s permission. As if sleeping exhausted, she slumps on the arm of a well-padded chair. Above her hangs a ludicrous poster of a topless model posing in soccer boots and holding a soccer ball.
 
To get the shots for the newspaper that she worked for, Ms. Battaglia had to ignore boundaries. In one picture, a policeman leads away a woman who has just murdered her boyfriend in a jealous rage. Beyond the pair is another photographer, maybe 12 feet away, his camera raised to take the standard picture of an arrest. But Ms. Battaglia can’t have been more than a foot from the policeman’s elbow.
“I always felt a need to show myself; not to hide; to say, ‘I’m here and I’m taking your photograph,’ ” says Ms. Battaglia. “I had cameras broken. I was punched. I was spat at. But that was to be expected,” she adds. One highly placed Mafioso, she recalls, kicked her hard.

 
Though her documentation of Mafia mayhem brought her fame, the exhibition shows her to be much more than an unusually creative ambulance-chaser. We see photos of a rat scuttling down a street in Palermo with a cat right behind; a hunched and wizened old lady contemplating with satisfaction the ice cream that she has just bought for herself on a feast day; a little girl, caught in a shaft of sunlight as she waits round a corner in an alley with her fists clenched, holding what might just be a makeshift garrote.
 
Laced through the show are the photographer’s Sicilian women—fixing the camera with dark, baleful eyes, often with expressions of misgiving and sorrow.
 
Ms. Battaglia started in photography late and almost by accident. At age 37, the mother of two daughters, she was desperate for an income of her own. She wanted to separate from her husband, and Italy had not yet legalized divorce.
 
She looked for work as a reporter at a Sicilian daily, L’Ora. It was August. Most of the journalists were on vacation. “I was lucky,” she says. Soon she moved to Milan and found that editors wanted photos to go with her articles. Approaching the age of 40, she picked up a camera professionally for the first time. She became so good at it, her old paper asked her to return as head of photography. She arrived back in Sicily just as Mafiosi from the town of Corleone were muscling their way into Palermo, murdering whoever got in their way.
 

For years, Ms. Battaglia says, she used a “very simple” Pentax. “I was never one for the technical side—I put up with it.” But she took “lots and lots and lots of photographs” on each assignment. And back at the paper, “in among the bad ones, there’d be a good one.”
 
Today, helped by the Rome-based publishing house Drago, she is painstakingly sifting through the discards. Some of her discoveries are in the exhibition, which ends March 30 and may go to other countries, according to Mr. Pietromarchi.
 
“Listen,” she says with a ring of youthful enthusiasm in her gravelly voice. “I’m actually impressing myself with the power of what I have done.”
 
The exhibition at the Maxxi was curated by Paolo Falcone, Margherita Guccione and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi.
 
Icons | Mafia Mayhem at a Museum. By John Hooper. The Wall Street Journal,   November 18, 2016. 

When Letizia Battaglia returned to Palermo in 1974 from a three-year sojourn in Milan, the city was enjoying a period of relative calm. There was the endemic corruption, obviously, and the usual posse of self-serving politicians. But no one was expecting a bloodbath, least of all Battaglia. She was already a 40-year-old mother of three, enjoying her first steady job as picture editor of a city newspaper. She wasn't looking to cover a war. But war, it seemed, had decided to come looking for her.
 
Sitting at a low table in her eighth-floor apartment in Palermo, Battaglia, now 76, flicks through some of the iconic images she captured during what Italians call the anni di piombo, the years of (flying) lead. Eighteen years in which the ferocious Corleonesi mafia clan would claim the lives of governors, senior policemen, entire mafia families and, ultimately, two of Battaglia's dearest friends: the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
 
This May marks the 20th anniversary of Falcone's assassination by a massive motorway bomb, which also killed the husband of Rosaria Schifani, one of Falcone's bodyguards. In the intervening years the big drug-trafficking wars have shifted, on a blood meridian, from Sicily to the Mexican border. But Battaglia's photographs testify that nothing has changed, that none of this is new. The techniques pioneered by the Corleonesi have proved their efficacy. Maximum violence. Total extermination of your rivals. Intimidation of the state.
 
If horror still lurches reliably out of Battaglia's pictures, so do the more complicated emotions of pity and despair. To many, these are the qualities that elevate them to the status of art. Battaglia's reputation has steadily risen over the years, attracting awards and exhibition space as far afield as New York and Amsterdam. But long before the foreign prizes and plaudits arrived, she'd already received domestic recognition of a more heartfelt kind: death threats.
 
That Battaglia ignored the threats, despite being advised to lie low by Falcone himself, comes as no surprise once you've met her. At first she puts you at ease with her husky laugh and friendly little dog, Pippo. Her apartment is dark and cool, the walls adorned with two of her more soothing photographic portraits: a girl, and a dove. Further along is a framed Red Flag (it's from India, sent by a daughter), which seems in keeping with Battaglia's bohemian dress and 60s fringe. Beyond the bookshelves is a balcony, its tiles and pot plants shining in the summer sun. Framed by the door the view could almost be a photo, a sanitised vision of the sunny present.
 
But once her eyes have fixed on you, her intensity is revealed. Let your gaze drift down to your notebook when she is declaiming something and you are abruptly reprimanded. "Look me in the eyes!" She is deadly serious. She insists on being heard. She smokes a lot.
 
During the height of the violence Battaglia would get called out at all hours of the day and night, and be on the scene of a murder, pushing through ghoulish crowds of onlookers, before the blood of the dead had begun to dry. It was unrelenting: they would find as many as seven bodies at a time. No sooner had she and her colleagues raced across town on mopeds to cover one killing, than they would receive news of another hit. "Before you'd even dealt with the desperation and suffering of one murder, you were already on the way to another. More blood, more violence."
 
But she didn't stop. This was never just a job. It was her duty as a citizen, she believed. And it showed. These urgent, often grainy shots were politics of the most incendiary kind. They were asking a question that no one at the time wanted, or dared, to hear: why?
 
"The worst thing was that we didn't understand at first where this inferno came from, she says. "No one knew about the Corleonesi. No one was getting caught for these crimes. And they always killed the best people. The best judges, the best policemen, the best politicians. It took years to understand what was going on, thanks to the work of Falcone and the testimony of the pentito Tommaso Buscetta."
 
Battaglia's inability to shield herself from the horrors she witnessed is still evident. At one point she shudders and asks me to put away a photo taken by her then-boyfriend and fellow photographer, Franco Zecchin. The photo in question has an almost surreal quality to it – three bored-looking young men slouch in the back of a bus, looking for all the world as if they haven't realised they're dead yet.
 
However, Battaglia didn't only photograph corpses. She ranged across Sicily, taking in religious festivals, psychiatric hospitals, crumbling slums and aristocratic salons. The stars of her photos are often young women, quietly enduring their various predicaments. The compassion that shines out of these portraits dispels any doubts one might entertain while wading through the bloodier end of her catalogue. Her art is not exploitative – it is about exploitation.
 
Though Battaglia describes her own childhood as serene, it was also suffocatingly cloistered. Palermo after the war was not a place for independent-minded girls and her father was possessive. He kept her locked up in the family home. "I couldn't go out because men would bother me on the street, even at 11 years of age," she says. Life with her jealous father soon became intolerable and at the first opportunity she bolted, which in those days meant marriage – at the age of 16, to a prosperous older man who worked in the coffee business.
 
Three children followed, but little happiness. Twenty-one years would pass before Battaglia finally mustered the courage to walk out. In a country where divorce was still illegal and feminism just a distant rumour, she installed herself and her daughters in the single room of an "alternative" household in Milan. She was penniless but free. Her family considered her ruined.
 
In Milan she learned her craft as a photo-reporter and soon, despite her family's forebodings, she was enjoying success and all the other things she'd previously lacked in life: creativity, independence, intellectual friends. Among these was the Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia. It was he who later wrote a catty article that labelled Borsellino as a "professional of the anti-mafia". The article was seized upon by the judge's enemies and used to isolate him. Five years later both he and Falcone were blown up by two separate bombs, one after the other. The judges knew it was coming. As Falcone said: "It is my destiny to take a bullet from the mafia one day. The only thing I don't know is when."

 
"Sciascia was an adorable person, but he had an outdated idea of the mafia," Battaglia says. "He made a mistake with that article, but I forgave him." As for Falcone and Borsellino, she has only praise. "I have two photographs of each of us together, taken by my daughter. They are the most important photographs of my life. I was proud to know them. These two brave Sicilians died to defend us."
 
But perhaps the most important friendship she made was with the maverick anti-mafia mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, with whom she served both on the city council and as a deputy in the regional parliament. "Those were the most beautiful years of my life. Better than being in love, or having children."
 
A price must be paid for this kind of political commitment. It was difficult for her daughters; it was difficult for her, too. When she bought an apartment in one of the roughest parts of town, intending to share the people's problems, she was repeatedly burgled under the eyes of her neighbours who, true to form, never saw a thing. A cynic might suggest this was a classic case of a communist intellectual showing solidarity with the masses, and the masses failing to reciprocate. But at least the thieves didn't steal her negatives. Battaglia's immense archive would provide sensational evidence when the former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti found himself in court answering charges of links to the mafia. Battaglia, years before, had taken a photo of him during a visit to Sicily which unwittingly showed him in the company of a mafioso. Despite this, the prosecution never succeeded in securing a conviction.
 
It was a defeat for the anti-mafia movement, one of many. But despite the difficulties of winning cases such as these, Battaglia believes that the answer to defeating Cosa Nostra is deceptively simple. "The mafia can be beaten, but only if people stop voting for dishonest politicians. It's no longer just a Sicilian problem. It's all over Italy."
 
Battaglia no longer does reportage – "I'm too old to keep walking the streets" – but she regularly visits schools and attends anti-mafia events, however lost the cause may seem sometimes. Is this what people mean when they describe her as impegnata, involved?
 
"It means setting an example," she says. "It means opposing the mafia in everything that I say and buy and eat. Every person that I meet, every gesture that I make, it's all connected to the need to liberate my country from the mafia." In a city like Palermo, where the vast majority of shops and businesses pay extortion money, that's not as easy as it sounds.
 
In fact, Battaglia doesn't go out much any more, except in the morning to walk the dog. She avoids contact with the city's middle classes, deemed guilty of what she calls moral absenteeism. She admits: "Palermo is a bit of a prison for me – it holds me down. Every now and then I need to get away. I even moved to Paris for a year and a half, but I couldn't help thinking about Palermo – despite all of its problems, its shit, its corruption, which is even worse now than it was before."
 
These symptoms of embittered love will be familiar to anyone who has lived in Sicily for an extended period of time. The place is infuriating, self-destructive and very nearly hopeless, but you can't shake it off. As Battaglia's friend Sciascia once said: "I hate and detest Sicily insofar as I love it, and insofar as it does not respond to the kind of love I would like to have for it.
 
 
Letizia Battaglia: shooting the mafia. By Peter Jinks. The Guardian, March 4, 2012.