Obituary of Letizia Battaglia, Italy’s greatest photographer – Media

Letizia Battaglia was often the first to arrive at the crime scene. If the blood was still warm, the police weren’t there yet. And the men watched as this reporter, like no one else in Sicily at the time, got very close with her Leica, a cigarette in her mouth, and took pictures. Without fear, but also without sensationalism. She was always there when Cosa Nostra bosses were arrested and taken away. Even then she got very close, so close that, as she once said, the mafiosi could have spit in her face. She wanted to hold her gaze as the triumph of supposed impunity imploded. These pictures were supposed to be revenge for the big island, that beautiful and battered floe in the Mediterranean. Sicily, the Italians often say, is “martoriata”, martyred by the mafia, which leaves nothing but misery in its wake.

With her photos, Letizia Battaglia shaped the perception of this raw brutality of everyday life in the 1970s and 1980s with their hundreds of dead, the murdered judges, politicians, journalists, civil servants. Their pictures burned themselves into the collective memory, they had a language, and it broke with the pseudo-romantic narration from American films about the mafia.

Battaglia was Italy’s greatest photojournalist, celebrated and honored around the world with exhibitions and awards for her black and white photographs. She herself was always very colorfully dressed, she dyed her hair red until the end, as an outward sign of her inner freedom. She died now, aged 87, of cancer in Palermo, her city, the city that stuck to her “like a second skin,” as the Sicilian journalist Attilio Bolzoni writes, the city from which she never broke free, although she often tries had.

Battaglia came to photography late. At the age of 16 she had already married a rich coffee merchant. At 17 she became a mother for the first time, then twice more, three daughters. One of them, Shobha Battaglia, would also become a successful photographer herself. At 34, Letizia Battaglia decided it was time to live some of the spirit of sixty-eight, which Sicily felt especially from afar, and let herself be carried away L’Ora hire, a left-wing Sicilian daily newspaper.

She captured the harshness of everyday life, crude and black and white, so no one forgot

She was assigned to the “Cronaca nera”, the black chronicle, where all evil flows together. Shortly thereafter she left her husband, moved to Milan with the children for a few years, founded an agency there with her new partner, which they called “Informazione Fotografica”, returned to Palermo and was now always on the go with the camera. She would have preferred to be a writer, but she said she lacked the talent. This is how she became Italy’s first female photojournalist.

Open detailed view

Most important to her were subjects with women and girls from difficult backgrounds, photographed in the streets. There is this famous photo of a girl with a ball in her right hand, her left arm above her head, in front of a scratched wooden door: Everything is in her eyes, the adult hardness of life.

But Battaglia became internationally known with a photo that was due to coincidence. January 6, 1980, Via Libertà, a rainy day. The photographer had just come from a coffee with colleagues when this service limousine was parked in the middle of the street, a few people were rioting around it, it looked like a traffic accident. Battaglia photographed through the driver’s window as a young, graying man dragged another man out of the car. The young man is Sergio Mattarella, then 39, university professor of constitutional law. In his arms he holds his brother Piersanti, then 42 and president of the Sicilian regional administration, from the Democrazia Cristiana. A mafia killer had just shot him. He was still alive when the photo that would go around the world was taken. He died a little later.

Open detailed view

Piersanti Mattarella had been a rare hopeful figure, a charismatic man with a thirst for renewal. Not everyone liked that, not even in his corrupt party, which was always closely associated with Cosa Nostra. His brother Sergio, a quiet professor with a melancholy smile, had never really intended to go into politics. But Piersanti’s death forced him to do so. Now he is President of the Republic, for the second time, no politician in Italy is more popular than he. And whenever his story is told, the newspapers show this photo, the drama in black and white.

The mafia’s pompous funerals? She went everywhere. Until 1992

Battaglia also attended mafia bosses’ funerals, which were always as pompous as state funerals. She photographed weeping widows, young recruits, the Picciotti, and the uncles from America who made it rich in the New World and commuted. Battaglia photographed when Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy, was in Palermo meeting with figures from the underworld. And she photographed the bosses in the cages of the Ucciardone, the prison in Palermo where, in the 1980s, the so-called “Maxiprocesso”, the great trial against Cosa Nostra, took place in a specially prepared auditorium. In 1992, when the Corleonesi judges murdered Giovanni Falcone with a bomb on the highway, Letizia Battaglia decided never to drive to crime scenes again.

It had become too much. She went to Paris, to Greenland, just gone. And then she always came back to Palermo.

She never got rid of her title “photographer of the Mafia”. She had never liked him: “If so,” she said, “I’m the photographer against the Mafia.” Of course, that’s what was meant. But Battaglia always fought for every comma of the interpretation. She was offered a bodyguard because she was often threatened. But she didn’t want that. For several years she worked in the team of Leoluca Orlando, the almost eternal mayor and spring maker of Palermo who will soon be stepping down Orlando gave her a presentation called “Vivibilità urbana”, i.e. “urban quality of life”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/medien/.”Das meant nothing and everything,” Letizia Battaglia once said. “But it was the best time of my life.”