The specter of death looms large in Letizia Battaglia’s photographs. Sometimes viscerally, as in her many images showing the victims of mafia violence: hunched over the steering wheel of a car or collapsed on the street, a pool of blood on the ground. In other images, death is on the faces of Battaglia’s subjects: widows and children of the murdered, their wounded expressions revealing as much about the toils of violence as the pictures of corpses. Each is a testament to the delicate border between life and death.
Battaglia’s photographs are currently on display at London’s Photographers’ Gallery in the fittingly titled “Life, Love and Death in Sicily” exhibition. As a photographer and later photo editor for the local daily newspaper L’Ora, Battaglia captured scenes of everyday life, but it’s her images of the mafia violence that so often characterize Sicily in the public imagination that define this brutal exhibition.
Violence, or rather the traces of violence, can be seen in so many of Battaglia’s photographs in this exhibition spanning nearly fifty years. Throughout the period, mafia gangs were at war with each other as well as the state. Their victims included judges, policemen, the carabinieri, bodyguards, eyewitnesses, other mobsters, fathers and sons. As more than one of Battaglia’s photographs demonstrates, not even childhood is safe from violence’s corrupting influence. Children play with guns they received as presents during the Day of the Dead. One young boy, no older than ten, holds a pistol bigger than his head, as his friend behind him sucks his thumb.
Does the constant presence of violence numb one to images of that violence? For years, Battaglia documented death and murder during one of Sicily’s most dangerous periods. She understood the risks. As if seeing the bodies in front of her lens wasn’t enough, she received death threats for publishing her work. “Leave Palermo immediately,” she was told in a letter. “With your way of doing things, you have broken our balls too much.” Such an atmosphere of fear only increases the moral courage in the work of being an eyewitness, even if it takes a personal toll. “You no longer knew who your friends or enemies were,” Battaglia once said. “You left the house in the morning and didn’t know if you would come back in the evening.”
Although it requires courage, photojournalism will always be tinged with moral complexities. “Photography changes nothing,” Battaglia once said. “Violence continues, poverty continues. Children are still being killed in stupid wars.” One wonders how Battaglia would photograph a warzone. The images of both the dead and grieving show the extent of mafia brutality, but they are nevertheless invasive and will always betray a sacred space of the living. Battaglia’s interests were commercial first and foremost. It’s a job, after all. Many of Battaglia’s images have a paparazzo feel, unsurprising given that they were commissioned and published to the beat of a daily newspaper. But like the best photojournalism, the images speak to something beyond their immediate time and place.
Battaglia’s photographic language collapses centuries into one another: her sharp black-and-white reportage style is filled with Catholic imagery and classical composition. Her photograph of Rosaria Schifani, for instance, one of the many widows photographed by Battaglia, is closer to a painting of Christ than a snapshot for a daily newsprint. The wide-angle lens she never moved away from throughout her career allowed her to shape compositions akin to Renaissance paintings, with protagonists throughout the frame, dead bodies and anguished onlookers. As with the great paintings, many of the photographs seem to invite interpretation; but they were all taken in the rush of a moment.
SEE ALSO: ‘Nostalgia for My Island’ Offers a Compressed and Communal History of Puerto Rican Art and Identity
Looking back on her career, Battaglia once described her photographs as “an archive of blood.” The exhibition—which is organized in no particular way other than being bookended by Battaglia’s first and final images—is characterized by death, but there is more than just violence and its victims. Working for a daily newspaper, Battaglia’s images also captured the rest of everyday life in Sicily: religious festivals, celebrities and sports events. On the second floor of the exhibition, you’ll walk into a room of hanging photographs (a ‘forest of images’) which has the feel of walking into a morgue. But the photographs themselves show all of life’s passions. And if there’s one word that captures Battaglia’s work, it’s passion: whether in grief or violence, shame or fear, love or celebration, there’s not a single image here that is not weighted by emotion. Whilst the images of violence are the most frequent and chilling, this is an exhibition about life as well as death, even if death is snickering in the corner of each frame.
“Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily” is at The Photographers’ Gallery in London through February 23, 2025.
