MICHAEL SIANI-DAVIES looks back on the work of Letizia Battaglia in light of her recent exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery.
Letizia Battaglia’s Pentax K1000 camera trembled, even more than usual, as she faced Nerina’s lifeless body. It was 1982, and the young sex worker lay slumped in an armchair alongside two other corpses in a nondescript Palermo apartment. It was the Mafia’s doing. Battaglia could sense this, having photographed scores of their murders. Yet, the sight of this young female victim perturbed her in a different way from the male corpses she had grown accustomed to documenting. Something about the motionless girl “lost in an eternity of silence” enchanted her. Battaglia even later confessed that she had momentarily fallen in “love”.
Indeed, if there is a unifying thread running through Battaglia’s photographs, whether they be of life or death, it is her profound sense of humanity. Her delicate touch of the shutter button ensured that her images, however lurid, were not exploitative but rather empathetic observations of Palermo’s lived reality. Perhaps it is our innate fear of death that initially obscures this, but looking closer it becomes clear that Battaglia’s photography is firmly rooted in her love of life.
At the age of ten, when Battaglia first moved to Palermo, Sicily, sexual harassment on the streets made her overprotective father restrict her movements. In that crucial moment, she lost her freedom—something she would spend the rest of her life fighting to reclaim. At sixteen, she ran away from home, determined to live life on her own terms. Over the next two decades, she married, had three daughters, divorced, fell into poverty, and bought a camera. Then, while working in Milan, she met the actor turned photographer Franco Zecchin and together they returned to Palermo in 1975. Armed with her humble Pentax, Battaglia, whose surname means “battle” in Italian, had found the voice she had long sought.
Setting foot in the Photographer’s Gallery last January for Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily provided solace from London’s wintery drizzle. Yet, the city’s monochrome grey still managed to seep into the exhibition rooms, echoing Battaglia’s own characteristic chiaroscuro style. One of her most influential photographs illustrates this: the portrait of Rosaria Schifani (1992) at the funeral of her husband, a bodyguard killed in an attack on an anti-mafia judge. The widow’s face is half illuminated, half shrouded by a veil of shadow, embodying a profound duality of despair and hope for the future. Another photo, He was killed on the way to the garage to get his car (1976), demonstrates Battaglia’s mastery of composition. It depicts a vessel of a man sunken in a pool of his own blood at the foot of a garage ramp. Above him looms a crowd and a car, their vantage point at the top of the ramp framing the scene in such a way that the lines of the road form a coffin-like shape around the body.
The first Mafia victim Battaglia photographed had already been dead for two days. Battaglia could’t stand death; above all, it smelt. And in the eerie silence of the gallery that same smell seemed to exude from her images. However, interspersed among the scenes of murder, arrests and violence were moments of respite, breaths of fresh air where Palermo’s innocent beauty was allowed to radiate. At first, these seemed incongruous, but I realised that this must have been the reality of Palermo at the time—joy perpetually overshadowed by the ever-present stain of death. The dichotomy is caught in the positioning of my favourite photograph in the exhibition, The Little Girl and the Shepherd (1986). Here, Battaglia uses a wide-angle lens to place the viewer in direct proximity to her subjects, powerfully contrasting the soft smile of the young girl in the centre of the frame with the distorted, slightly out of focus old shepherd in the foreground. It is another brilliant composition which draws you in with its warmth and leaves you full of hope, until your eyes drift to the neighbouring image. This shows a boy of similar age, but his wary eyes speak not of happiness but of dread. He loyally stands guard next to his father’s coffin; a white shroud blurs the corpse’s features, creating a ghostly presence that mimics a motion blur. These stark photographs set off a whirlwind of emotions that leave you giddy, intoxicated by the heady blend of youth, death, and the fragile beauty that sustains life in between.
Concentrating on the photographs it would be easy to overlook a glass case of some of Battaglia’s negatives. These seemingly insignificant strips of film offer a profound glimpse into the chaos she faced at every crime scene. Their crooked framing and uneven exposure speak of haste. With only time for five or six shots she circled each body, capturing the scene from every possible angle.
In the latter section of the exhibition, rows of photographs hung suspended from the ceiling at eye level, creating an immersive installation known as The Forest. This arrangement encroaches on the viewer’s space, forming narrow alleyways that make you feel as though you are navigating Palermo’s backstreets alongside Battaglia. Enveloped by the city, you are drawn into the scenes: couples kissing on a beach, children rushing to a festival and families posing in their vintage cars. Viewing these compassionate glimpses into everyday life it is tempting to reductively divide Battaglia’s work, separating these images from those documenting the Mafia’s atrocities. However, it’s perhaps more meaningful to see them as a justification for the duty she felt to capture the violence, as even in these seemingly ordinary scenes, the pervasive shadow of the Mafia is ever-present: children are seen holding guns, juries sit in solemn deliberation during trials and impressionable young men are dressed in Mafiosi-style suits.
The final photo in the exhibition, Olympia in Mondello, reflects the direction Battaglia took in her later years, a shift away from the darkness that defined much of her earlier work. Like the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado in his book Genesis, or the British photographer Don McCullin, who turned from documenting war to the landscape of Somerset, Battaglia sought solace by training her lens on beauty. Arguably, one of the most decisive moments in any documentary photographer’s career is when they come to the realisation that, even in a world overwhelmed by suffering—a world they may feel compelled to evidence—there remains hope and beauty. For Battaglia, this lay in the female body. Her photographs capture women not through the male gaze but instead in the natural appreciation one woman has for another; even in the harrowing encounter with Nerina’s lifeless body, Battaglia felt a profound reverence for the courage and “dreams” the female body could hold.
Battaglia passed away in 2022, having been internationally recognised for her photography. Her strong social conscience even led her to venture into politics, though she later admitted she wished she had spent the time taking pictures instead. She was troubled by parts of her work and at times even contemplated burning her negatives. Indeed, some tragedies proved too hard even for her. In 1979, her friend Boris Giuliano was murdered. He was Palermo’s police chief, and had been instrumental in granting Battaglia access to crime scenes at a time when press photography was dominated by men. She couldn’t bring herself to photograph his body—it was for no one to see, especially the Mafia. While she justified immortalising the deaths of strangers as a way to give voice to the voiceless, photographing a fallen ally in the fight was a different matter. Her powerful self-ascribed duty to document injustice continued to drive her forward, but she knew that photographs never allow you to forget. And some memories, she decided, were too painful to preserve.
