Photographers' Gallery 10:00
Letizia Battaglia was a witness, she was there.
She saw the mafia tearing Italy apart in the 1970s, murdering its sons, raping its daughters, and she documented all of it with her camera.
She started out as a late-budding journalist, an apprentice in her mid-30s for Palermo’s daily newspaper l’Ora. Camera in hand, she captured the bloody reality of life under the oppressive rule of the mafia. There are images in the opening room of parties, dances, kids, lovers. But they’re overpowered by the endless photos of death on display. Battaglia was first on the scene after judges were assassinated, politicians killed, henchmen murdered. There are bodies under sheets, abandoned in alleys, lying lifeless in cars; the blood staining the street is as normal as the rubbish that litters it. There’s no Godfather-esque glamourisation of mafia life here, just the mundane, basic, ordinary reality of everyday murder. Look at the photo of the little girl standing in sunlight, a huge terrifying man lurking in the darkness near her: that’s what this is about, life in the constant shadow of crime and violence.
Life in the constant shadow of crime and violence
It’s a violence that Battaglia was made personally aware of. A framed letter from the mafia threatens her life, because she’s ‘broken our balls too much’.
Eventually, Battaglia had enough of holding the mafia to account, of trying to expose injustice. Her final mafia picture is a solemn, quiet portrait of a widow mourning the murder of her husband, a bodyguard killed while protecting two judges. It’s an image filled with resignation and silent heartbreak.
It’s not all murder (though there is a lot of it), other images instead capture the poverty and hardship of life in Palermo. There’s plenty of gelato, loads of Catholicism and a bunch of nonnas, but it’s all shot through with death and misery.
There are some incredible photos here. Excellently composed, shockingly confrontational, but tender despite the grimness. None of this is pleasant, or joyful, or beautiful, but it’s all something that photojournalism must always be: it’s real.
