“I never thought of myself as an artist, and I am still astonished to enter into a museum and see my work.” -Letizia Battaglia

I am not a photographer…

These are the words of renowned photojournalist Letizia Battaglia. She documented the “Second Mafia War” in Palermo, Italy. She and her life partner, Franco Zecchin were the first on the scene with their cameras because they had an illicit police scanner in much the same way Weegee had done with his authorized scanner in New York.

“We were always ready, washed and clean — at night, during the day, always ready to race there,” she recalled in an article by Elisabetta Povoledo in 2017.

Letizia Battaglia married at 16 to escape her domineering father. She had three daughters by her mid-twenties, then left her husband in 1971 after 10 years and moved to Milan.

Journalist

Letizia Battaglia worked writing stories for a local newspaper in Milan then she moved back to Palermo. She was writing for the paper L’Ora. The editors told her to photograph the stories she was telling. She taught herself how to use a Leica 35mm camera using photographers like Mary Ellen Mark and Diane Arbus as inspiration. She had just turned 39.

Photojournalist

One of her first photos published in L’Ora was of a Mafia member who had been executed by a rival gang several days earlier in rural Sicily. She told the Guardian in 2019 that she could still remember the smell of that day 45 years later.

“Everyone is equal in death,” she said. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days. Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”

Residents of Palermo followed the paper to see who had been murdered the day before. Battaglia provided the photographs. “I thought, ‘With this [camera] in my hand, I can take on the world,’” she said, “Suddenly, I no longer needed kisses or caresses. Instead, I had this confidence, this independence. But it was not just about expressing myself. With the camera, I could also express the inquietude of the world.”

Hundreds of deaths

The Mafia family wars both in and near Palermo resulted in many hundreds of people being killed. Letzia Battaglia’s bloody black and white archive showed the violence in Sicily to the world. She rode her Vespa scooter carrying her Leica around the alleys of Palermo by day and night. She often got to the murders before the police and the victem’s relatives.

“They were terrible years,” she said, “You no longer knew who your friends or enemies were. In the morning, you came out of the house and did not know if you’d come back in the evening. The bosses could blow my head off, any second.”

“When the police stopped them, I approached them, as close as possible, to photograph them, in their handcuffs. I wanted the bosses to look me in my eyes, even at the cost of spitting on my face. That was also a way for me to challenge the mafia.”

Photos of murders

“When I took the photos, no one said to me, ‘Brava,’ no one,” she said. She had just been doing her job, no small achievement for a Sicilian woman working in a predominantly male world. “Sometimes I look at my photos and say, ‘I was in there.’ Three people murdered. I look at them and think, ‘What a horror, three people murdered,’” she said. There, in her Palermo apartement were large-format prints of several photographs — including one of a triple homicide — leaned haphazardly against a couch, waiting to be shipped to yet another exhibit. “I can’t accept that anymore,” she said.

Letizia Battaglia in her Palermo apartment with prints of her photos of Mafia victems. Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

She worked for L’Ora from 1974 to 1992. “Photography changes nothing,” she told the Guardian. “Violence continues, poverty continues, children are still being killed in stupid wars.”

She walked away from her Leica in 1992 after two anti-Mafia judges were killed. She said she was shocked and exhausted by the seemingly never-ending violence.

The fight continues

Over 4,000 Mafia members have been arrested in Sicily since the 1980s. Palermo is now free from gunfire and killings.

In 2018 it was named Italy’s capital of culture and hosted Manifesta the most important exhibit of contemporary art in Europe. Palermo is on the Unesco world heritage list.

Letzia Battaglia said, “It’s true, the mafia no longer shoots, but you must not lower your guard. You can also continue to fight the mafia, with beauty,” she said. “Beauty makes us understand what we might lose again.’’

Sources: My Art Guides, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Interview in The Guardian.

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