Letizia Battaglia’s avenue images was so highly effective, the mafia threatened to kill her

One of Italy’s most vital social documentary photographers, Letizia Battaglia, began monitoring the brutal actuality of life beneath the Mafia within the late Sixties – when the photographer herself was already in her 40s.

The outcomes are a few of the best-known data of what situations had been like within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. But it’s not simply the harshness of dwelling within the shadow of the organised crime group that we see in her stark and delightful work, there’s on a regular basis and strange scenes too.

Battaglia was a civil rights activist, writer, movie director, politician, photograph museum director and journalist.

In this gorgeous little quantity, we see work that extends past that for which she has develop into most-well identified. From it we are able to see how her skilled work grew to become intertwined together with her private life to convey sensitivity and humanity to her images.

Self-taught as a photographer, Battaglia first started to take pictures in an effort to higher promote her writing. Her want for justice, independence and alter noticed images as the proper car to painting all of that.

Her braveness noticed her {photograph} victims of the Madia murders, in addition to fierce in-fighting between rival gangs and their assaults on civil society. Police officers, judges and outstanding institution figures additionally confronted her lens – a strong image of the corruption and violence that was endemic. Indeed, the truth that her work was used as proof of hyperlinks between corrupt politicians and the Mafiosi is testomony to the ability of photojournalism.

Of course, none of this made her widespread, usually receiving loss of life threats to the extent that she was by no means certain she’d make it house alive. As the photograph director at L’ora, Palermo’s day by day newspaper, Battaglia attended nearly each main crime scene within the metropolis earlier than L’Ora closed in 1990. It’s estimated she took 600,000 pictures for the paper. This assortment she described as ‘an archive of blood. An archive of pain, despair and terror.’

Despite her notoriety for her photographs, she strongly opposed the label of “Mafia photographer”, as a substitute believing that her position was to hunt out merely “life”. To that finish, she was in a position to construct up a multifaceted portrait of her homeland in Sicily, and looking out by means of her work you get an concept for her sensitivity and empathy for these dwelling in positivity. Above all, you see that each struggling and pleasure are likely to coexist in probably the most unlikely of locations.

Of late, Battaglia is having fun with a resurgence in her legacy. In 2025, a serious retrospective of her work took over each gallery flooring of The Photographer’s Gallery in London. To stroll by means of the show was to be reminded of her masterful method, in addition to the bravery she will need to have had. The exhibition gained the exhibition of the 12 months title in our 2025 Amateur Photographer awards, such was its high quality and excellence.

This assortment is gathered collectively in a Thames & Hudson “Photofile”. These small and compact little books are designed to offer an introduction, or an outline to a photographer’s life. Available at an inexpensive value, they’re form of like a fast information to main icons in images, supplying you with all of the information you should gen up on somebody in a fast and digestible format. Arguably the small dimension doesn’t give full credit score to the work right here, however it ought to be remembered that almost all of this may have initially been proven on the pages of a newspaper, so it’s maybe fairly becoming in spite of everything.

Battaglia died in 2002, aged 87. Her extraordinary legacy lives on by means of books and exhibitions of her work – and this one particularly, as neat as it’s compact comes very extremely really useful.

Letizia Battaglia (Photofile), with textual content by Walter Guadagnini is printed by Thames & Hudson and is available for purchase now. ISBN: 9780500411315

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