Letizia Battaglia
Photographer who risked her life to chronicle the murderous excesses of the Sicilian Mafia
LETIZIA BATTAGLIA, who has died aged 87, was a Sicilian photographer whose unflinching record of the appalling crimes of the Mafia helped to combat its campaign of terror on the island during the 1970s and 1980s.
Letizia Battaglia was perhaps an unlikely thorn in the side of organised crime. Her photographic career began in the early 1970s, when, as a divorcée and single mother of three daughters, she joined the staff of the Sicilian daily Left-wing newspaper L’ora. The paper had itself been a target of a Mafia bombing campaign.
She took more than half a million photographs, covering all aspects of Sicilian life, from children playing mobsters in the piazzas to lovers kissing in the countryside. But it was her images of the havoc caused by the Sicilian Mafia, known as the Cosa Nostra, that made her name.
Weaving through the streets of Palermo on her Vespa, armed only with a Leica, she captured the aftermath of shootings, with figures slumped in cars and on pavements, and bomb attacks on galleries and churches. At arrests, she got as close as possible to culprits to show them in handcuffs.
She photographed hundreds of bodies – judges, prosecutors and witnesses as well as those killed in feuds – along with the trauma of families caught up in the mayhem. The job took its toll: “The constant sight, every day, of all those dead makes you crazy.”
In a country where political and criminal cliques interweave, often with murderous results, her pictures – which she once described as “indictments” – provided an important record. One of her shots, from 1980, showed Sergio Mattarella, the current president of Italy, holding the body of his murdered brother Piersanti, the anti-mafia President of Sicily, who had just been shot on his way to church. Another, showing Giulio Andreotti, a former prime minister of Italy, in the company of Mafia associate Nino Salvo, lay unnoticed in her archive until it was found by the police, and proved pivotal in Andreotti’s corruption trial in 1993.
With its fearless viewpoint and heavy monochrome, her work echoed the post-war Neorealist movement, in which the poetic folded into the brutal. One of her most famous photographs was of the corpse of Giuseppe Lo Baido, shot in a Palermo alley in 1977. It is as striking in its composition – a baroque drama reminiscent of Caravaggio – as it is ghastly in its subject. What is remarkable is the proximity of the shot: it is as if she had got to the scene before the Carabinieri. The blood is still wet.
Letizia Battaglia was born on March 5 1935 in Palermo. The family moved to north Italy, where Letizia spent her early years. Aged 16, she eloped and married Ignazio Stagnitta, an older man. The couple divorced in 1971 and Letizia moved to Milan to begin a career in journalism, initially as a writer.
There she met her long-term partner, Franco Zecchin, a photographer who would later become a member of the Magnum agency. Together they moved to Palermo, where she took her first professional photographs just as she was turning 40. “I was the first female photographer in Italy to work for a daily paper,” she recalled. “Three days after I started, I saw my first murder.”
In 1979 she put herself in the firing line when she showed monumental prints of Mafia victims in the central square in Corleone, the town made famous by Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather. Leaving the house, she observed, was like running a gauntlet.
In 1985, she took her fight against the Mafia into politics, representing the Green Party on the city council and the Sicilian regional assembly. “I lasted 10 years,” she said. “In retrospect, I only wasted time I could have dedicated to photography.”
The murder of a 10-year-old boy in 1987 changed her thinking. “The death of that innocent child, killed because he had witnessed a murder, marked me forever,” she said. “They took away the right to life. The right to dream. That is why, from the destruction of life, I decided to move on to the construction of life. From horror to beauty.” In later life she photographed more hopeful subjects, like portraits of children.
By the time L’ora closed in 1990, Letizia Battaglia was the paper’s veteran photo editor. She also ran a small press for a time, published a women’s journal and campaigned for the conservation of Palermo’s historical buildings.
Her photobooks include Passion, Justice, Freedom – Photographs of Sicily (2003) and The Duty to Report (2006). She made a cameo appearance as a photographer in Wim Wenders’s drama Shooting Palermo (2008) and in 2019 a feature-length documentary, Shooting the Mafia, was made about her.
She received many accolades, including the Cornell Capa Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York in 2009. With thousands of Mafiosi put behind bars, in recent years she got to see her once-violent city enjoy a renaissance. In 2018 Palermo was made the Italian capital of culture. “But the fight is not over,” Letizia Battaglia observed. “It’s true, the Mafia no longer shoots, but you must not lower your guard.”
She is survived by her daughters, one of whom is Shobha Battaglia, herself a successful photographer.