Magistrate Roberto Scarpinato with his escort on the roofs of the Court. Palermo (1998) © Letizia Battaglia
“I’m not a photographer, but I’ve always taken pictures,” said Letizia Battaglia (1935-2022), who used the camera as a weapon against the Mafia and helping the government put an end to the despotic reign of terror in the 1990s in her native Sicily. As the first woman photojournalist at a daily Italian newspaper, Battaglia broke the code of silence (omertà) used to subjugate, exploit, brutalize, and control the people of the ancient island. Her unflinching photographs of corruption, violence, suffering, and death were a radical act of defiance and solidarity, forging a hallucinatory chronicle of organized crime as a spectacle of greed, depravity, and bloodlust.
Now the new exhibition, Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily looks back at the photographer’s groundbreaking career, bringing together works made between 1971–2021 to create a hypnotic portrait of a woman willing to risk it all for justice. While Hollywood has long enjoyed a salacious love affair with the mob, lionizing its leaders and henchmen as romantic anti-heroes and sophisticated psychopaths, Battaglia had no such illusions about the men she photographed, pointing her camera directly at those who could just as easily have her killed. But she remained unbowed, driven by a need to fight back that began as a young girl growing up in 1950s Palermo after the war.
Battaglia dreamed of being a writer, understanding the pen more honorable than the sword, but her dreams were dashed when her father locked her in the house at the age of 10 after an adult male masturbated in front of her on the street. He sent her to Catholic school, hoping religion would wash away the “sin” but all it did was make her an atheist and a rebel. At 16, she escaped her father by marrying an older man, bearing three daughters, and slowly going mad inside another authoritarian relationship.
After a two-year stay at a Swiss sanitarium, Battaglia returned home determined to save her life. In 1971, she divorced her husband, and began working as a freelance journalist for L’Ora, Sicily’s daily newspaper, at 36 years old. Realizing stories with pictures net better results, Battaglia took up photography, and quickly broke the glass ceiling, becoming the first woman staff photojournalist in Italian history. “I was saved by photography. I was a young, intelligent, desperate woman. My encounter with photography allowed me to express my thoughts, my rebellion, my social and political commitment,” Battaglia said in the gripping 2019 documentary film, Shooting the Mafia.
Three days after Battaglia began working as a photojournalist, she was sent to photograph a mafia hit, the victim’s body still at the site. Nothing would ever be the same again. She photographed murder scenes, funerals, and families broken by the pain, amassing “an archive of blood” consisting of more than 600,000 images made over 19 years. The scale of violence is harrowing to behold. “At times, there were five murders a day. Once there were seven, all in the same place. We’d never known a slaughter like it,” Battaglia said. “It was civil war in Palermo. In one year, they killed about a thousand people. Every day I thought they might shoot me. I got used to it, accepted it. They smashed my cameras. I was spat at. I got death threats over the phone. I got anonymous letters. It was good to be a bit crazy. It gave me courage.”
While the origins of the Mafia are shrouded in secrecy, they held Sicily with an iron grip for over a century, their influence only briefly quelled by Mussolini. Following the war, they moved from the countryside to the cities, turning the streets into battlegrounds, waging war against the government, trade unionists, and rival families alike. But the work took its toll. “There were times when fear took over. I don’t want to think about pain,” Battaglia said. “My photos of the Mafia, of the dead. I wanted to burn them…I dreamed of burning my negatives, but I have no right. I want to take away the beauty that others see in them. I want to destroy them… I look at my photos, it’s just blood, blood, blood.”
Although she would win the esteemed W. Eugene Smith Find Grant in 1985, for Battaglia photography was a means, not the ends in and of itself. After photographing a young boy executed after witnessing his father’s murder, it was time to hang up the camera and forge a new path. She became a politician, working as a Green Party member of the Palermo city council, as well as a civil rights activist, environmentalist, publisher, film director, and photo museum director, becoming one of the most influential figures in 20th century Sicilian history and contemporary life.
“Today, there’s a greater awareness that the mafia is something negative. That sells drugs. That exploits. That incites violence,” Battaglia said in 1999. “We have to have respect for Sicilians who fought against political corruption and the mafia with their very lives. They sacrificed their lives to defend us. To free society of mafia bullying…. There were struggles, sacrifices, heroes. I know them all by heart. I was a photographer. I remember all the dates. Even today when I’m walking down the street, I can remember, ‘There, there, there.’”
Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily is on view through February 23, 2025, at The Photographers’ Gallery in London
