Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily

Letizia Battaglia is the catalogue published on the occasion of the monographic exhibition open to the public from Oct. 8, 2024 to Feb. 23, 2025 at the Photographer's Gallery in London, curated by Paolo Falcone, in collaboration with the Letizia Battaglia Archive, Falcone Foundation for the Arts, and with the contribution of Candido Speroni and Carla Fendi Speroni Foundation and the Italian Cultural Institute of London.

The exhibition, like the catalog, testifies to Italian life and society with photographs from the great photographer's historical archive. For nearly fifty years Letizia Battaglia has photographed, observed and lived intensely her time and especially her city, Palermo. Letizia Battaglia is a tribute to her work, her intense and new gaze, her yearning for freedom and her always being a woman against the tide. It is an uninterrupted album that goes from Milan to the face of Pier Paolo Pasolini, from the many mafia deaths to the unconscious elegance of the little girls of the Cala district in Palermo; and then the religious processions, the faces of Piersanti Mattarella, Giovanni Falcone up to the ferocious boss Leoluca Bagarella. For almost fifty years, Letizia Battaglia has photographed, observed and experienced her time and above all her city, Palermo.

As Shoair Mavlian, director of the Photographers' Gallery in London, writes, Letizia Battaglia's images could be seen “through the lens of life; something chaotic, random, unpredictable, cruel and dangerous, but also full of love and empathy”. With a text by Paolo Falcone, the volume's editor, the photographs now chase each other in a unique and formidable sequence where ‘photography and everyday life converge in a single path that highlights the extraordinary visual sensitivity, the courage to be at the distance of a punch or a caress to conquer the image, often obtained in extreme contexts but always full of dignity’.

About the Author

Born in Palermo in 1935, Letizia Battaglia declined in many ways her commitment against crime: as a photographer, editor, alderman, environmental activist, advocate for human and women’s rights. Her images, a fundamental piece in the history of reportage in Italy, earned her the prestigious Eugene W. Smith Award in 1985 and, in 1999, the Mother Johnson Achievement for Life. She passed away in Palermo on April 13, 2022, at the age of 87.