Letizia Battaglia

Ľudstvo v tieni Cosa Nostry / výstava

Biography

Letizia Battaglia (1935–2022) was born in Palermo, Sicily. She began her career as a photographer in the early 1970s, at the age of 35. She documented everyday life as well as the brutal reality of the Mafia and its victims in Sicily throughout the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Her photographs are among the best-known visual records of life in the shadow of the Mafia.
In her relentless fight against organised crime, Battaglia used her camera to document the daily terror and bring it to the front pages of newspapers. As a photographer and later head of the photographic department at the daily newspaper L’Ora, she was personally present, or represented by one of her colleagues, at every major crime scene in Palermo over two decades.
Battaglia worked mainly in black and white. She also captured scenes of everyday life, photographing women and children in their neighbourhoods and on the streets. Her images reveal both the richness of local life and the misery of a city seemingly abandoned to its fate. She documented poverty on the streets, the lives of the upper classes, religious processions, festivals, funerals and much more.