Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily

The records of the Sicilian life by Letizia Battaglia: Bloody, poignant, but also visually beautiful and striking.

By the beginning of January, I went to see how Battaglia photographed the bloody reality of everyday life in Sicily in the shadow of the Mafia during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Her images are some of the best-known records of this well known period, beyond the cinematographic genre (one of my favourites by the way). In her relentless pursuit against organised crime, she used her camera to document the daily terror, putting it on the front page. Photo journalism that became photo documentary. A proper work in the front line.

She mainly photographed in black and white, which is perfect. But she also captured daily life, with women and children in their neighbourhoods and streets, showing the wealth of the area and at the same time the misery of a city almost abandoned to its fate. Somehow, these photographs, are beautiful and poetic.

This show gives you the perfect glimpse of the Sicilian daily life back at the time, giving you the opportunity of viewing and being present in a scene that you wouldn’t like to be part of. It creates a “too close” effect, almost intimate with some of the victims. You get lost in the stories, in the scenes, with photographs suspended from the ceiling for you to navigate and go through something that happened no long time ago.