More about Letizia Battaglia:

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

She is best known for her stark black-and-white photographs of Palermo during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, when Mafia violence was deeply woven into everyday life. As photo editor at L’Ora, she and her colleagues were often present at major crime scenes, producing images that became some of the most powerful visual records of life in the shadow of organised crime.

What makes Battaglia especially powerful is that her work was not only about death. She also photographed children, women, religious rituals, street life, poverty, intimacy, mourning and moments of celebration. This gives her work a remarkable tension: Sicily appears as a place of brutality 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 visibility could challenge silence and denial. Later, she continued her anti-Mafia engagement through politics and cultural work, helping to create publications and spaces connected to women’s voices, civic life and social change. For me, the exhibition is therefore more than a photography show: it is a testimony to resistance, memory and humanity.