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.
The drama and chaos are intense – Battaglia’s wide-angle lens shows the anxious clamour of reporters, flashlights, police, desperate relatives and onlookers, trying to make sense of what has happened. Often the bodies lie next to, or are still slumped in their cars – the terrible irony of nearly getting away. On the scene often mere moments after a murder, Battaglia also pays attention to its impact: women’s bodies buckling with grief, supplicating hands and feet bare. Standing out among the disarray is the beatific composure of Rosaria Schifani at her husband’s funeral in Palermo Cathedral in 1992. The image became an emblem of resistance, a quiet plea for an end to the bloodshed.
This part of the show brings together images taken in the 1970s and 1990s, when Battaglia worked as the photographer director at L’Ora, a daily Palermitan paper. Reporters for the paper had disappeared; Battaglia herself received direct threats – a typed letter sent from the mafia in 1982 ominously advised her to “leave Palermo immediately … With your way of doing things you have broken our balls too much.” Battaglia dug in: in 1985, she was elected to the Palermo city council, and was later appointed regional deputy in the Sicilian government. She continued to take her pictures. Looking at what happened to so many who crossed paths so directly with the mafia, it is remarkable she emerged unscathed.
This part of the exhibition perhaps devotes too much space to the sordid mob murders – especially for a photographer who was ultimately frustrated to be defined by her images of the mafia. Presented rhythmically rather than according to theme or chronology, the works are installed to retrace Battaglia’s movements, something akin to what she might have witnessed on a typical day – accidents, arrests, court cases, religious occasions, festivals, funerals, high society events, poverty. It is not always a favourable image of Sicily, but it is a watchful one. With Battaglia on the beat, you have the feeling nothing would go unseen.
Then there are glimpses of another Battaglia, when she takes metaphorical turns, with a kind of sparse, guarded hope. The images are suspended at eye level, filling the space, making you encounter them as she did – as close as a punch or a caress.
There are lovers on Mondello beach – the favourite seaside resort of young Palermitans. Battaglia allows herself a little satire too – a cat stalks a fat rat on the street; a crowd of smiling, elegantly dressed men, arms flung out, perform as Christ during Easter celebrations.
Battaglia kept making pictures until her death in 2022. Her later period of work, represented in just one image here, turned to female nudes; a different way of looking at bodies. Perhaps after all the destruction she had witnessed, Battaglia perceived in women’s bodies some optimism, or at least, the future. There is a picture of her daughter giving birth to her granddaughter, a monumental and mighty moment as universal and powerful as the crude finality of the corpses.
In another image, a dove hovers just in front of two young boys in a square in Trapani. Their eyes seem to meet, the boys captivated by its gaze and fleeting proximity. A moment of magic in the profound darkness.
• Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London until 23 February
