Letizia Battaglia took her pictures from the distance “of a punch or a caress”. Violence and passion intertwine endlessly in the works of the late social documentary photographer who chronicled one of her native Sicily’s deadliest periods. Battaglia – whose name translates as “battle” – fought for her place to be Palermo’s eye witness. She was often the only woman at the scene, as her pictures reveal, up close to her subjects – dead or alive. When she returned to her home city in 1974, it was to a frenzy of bloodshed, as two pitiless new mafia bosses took leadership of the Corleonesi clan. Thousands were murdered in the ensuing years. Battaglia moved through the wake of the violence with her camera.
Walking through the first room of Battalgia’s exhibition, it feels that death was ready to pounce from every dark corner. Image after image show murdered men, carabinieri, magistrates, politicians, fathers, sons and husbands – a man who had, the captions reads, gone out to buy cannoli – bullets ripping holes in expensive suits. The dignity of the deceased is not always protected; in her commitment to describe the true horror of these deaths, Battaglia was unflinching. The atmosphere is heavy and stifling, heightened by Battalgia’s thick chiaroscuro, the blackness that seems to seep in like the pools of blood.
