More about Letizia Battaglia:

Letizia Battaglia was an Italian photographer, photojournalist, activist and politician. She was born in Palermo in 1935 and died in Cefalù in 2022. In 1969, she began working as a journalist for the newspaper L’Ora, and photography soon became the medium through which she made visible what many preferred not to see: the violence, corruption and social damage caused by the Sicilian Mafia.

She is best known for her powerful black-and-white photographs of Palermo in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, when Mafia violence was deeply intertwined with everyday life. As photo editor at L’Ora, she and her colleagues were often present at major crime scenes. Their images became some of the most powerful visual testimonies of life in the shadow of organized crime.

What makes Battaglia’s work especially powerful is that it is not only about death. She also photographed children, women, religious rituals, street life, poverty, intimacy, mourning and moments of celebration. As a result, a remarkable tension emerges in her work: Sicily appears as a place of cruelty and tenderness, fear and resilience, public violence and private humanity.

Her photography was also a form of resistance. She received death threats but continued to photograph because she believed that visibility could break through silence and denial. Later, she continued her anti-Mafia commitment through politics and cultural work and helped create publications and spaces connected with women’s rights, citizenship and social change. The exhibition is therefore more than a photography exhibition: it is a testimony to resistance, memory and humanity.