The Brooklyn Rail

Towards the end of photographer Letizia Battaglia’s (1935–2022) current exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, we encounter a long excerpt taken from the documentary La mia Battaglia. Here, Battaglia recounts how she felt at odds with the sensationalist attitude of her male counterparts at L’Ora, the left-wing daily in Palermo for which she photographed for over twenty years in all its sordidness and, less frequently, splendor. In particular, she recalls one instance in which a colleague of hers left the scene of a murder and went to break the news to the victim’s family himself, because it was standard practice to accompany the chronicle of a killing with the picture of a mother wailing and yanking her hair out in the street. The exhibition as a whole shows how such tension between denunciation and reticence—the need, on the one hand, to portray violence with an unflinching eye and, on the other, the desire to protect the dignity of the victims—was always in the back of Battaglia’s mind while documenting Mafia activities in Sicily.

Battaglia, who took up photography in her late thirties and was entirely self-taught, came to the medium as a tool for emancipation and self-expression. She was dealt a particularly bad hand though, when her return to Palermo in 1974 after a three-year stint in Milan coincided with an intensification of hostilities between the upcoming Corleonesi Mafia clan and their city rivals, which soon would culminate in the early 1980s with what came to be known as the Second Mafia War. For two decades, Battaglia would document the reverberations of such criminal standoffs in a city where violence and killings had become a daily, almost pedestrian occurrence. And she persisted until the twin murders of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 made it impossible to continue.

What emerges is the portrait of a city where there were very few things to salvage, and even these hinged on a leap of faith, or better yet, a Gramscian “optimism of the will, pessimism of intelligence.”

The first room of the show opens with a mural of front pages of L’Ora that singles out Battaglia’s first ever photograph, a portrait of prostitute Enza Montoro. From there, it alternates snapshots taken directly from crime scenes with photographs documenting everyday life. What’s most interesting is that—perhaps with the sole exception of Rosaria Schifani, the wife of one the bodyguards killed alongside Falcone—this juxtaposition doesn’t create a contrast, but rather a uniformly somber image of the city as a place of material and spiritual decay. Here, men turn up dead every day and women are left to weep, while the distinction between Mafiosi, legal authorities, and petty criminals almost evaporates. Looking at a suited man surrounded by four armed escorts, I was shocked to learn that the figure in question was in fact not a gangster, but Magistrate Roberto Scarpinato smoking a cigarette on the rooftop court.

An image of killer Leoluca Bagarella—the author of over one hundred and fifty killings, as well as the person who, years later, would order the murder of Falcone—beside himself while being taken away in handcuffs alternates with the image of a crying baby set against a widening crack in the wall of a poorly-built building. Likewise, a photograph showing Piersanti Mattarella—a notable member of the ruling Christian Democrats and President of the Sicilian Region at the time of his death in 1980—as he is taken out of his car so that only his feet are visible is followed by a picture of a Christ carried during a religious procession, also shown in an Andrea Mantegna-esque scorciamento.

The atmosphere in the downstairs gallery, thanks in part to a series of two-faced glass windows which are left hanging directly from the ceiling, feels slightly less oppressive. Toward the end, the exhibition even seems to expand thematically with portraits of painter Renato Guttuso and writer Leonardo Sciascia laughing together, as well as Battaglia’s own daughter giving birth. Most of Battaglia’s photographs of people have something just a bit off, or even desperate, about them, and yet, here the gaze is ultimately commanded by those images in which death is all too apparent. The Dry Tree (1980) is a particularly striking picture, showing a corpse set against a tree and a pile of crates. Death lurks too, as a ghostly presence, in a picture which depicts the desk of police chief Giorgio Boris Giuliano awash with bouquets of flowers on the day of his murder in 1979.

Battaglia was, among many other things, an activist who served as an elected member of Palermo’s city council and was instrumental in passing land-use regulations which significantly curbed urban speculation. During her career, she received several death threats, and a granulated picture buried deep in her archive portraying Giulio Andreotti with Mafioso Nino Salvo was decisive in proving the seven-time Italian prime minister's ties to the Mafia (even if ultimately he was never convicted for his crimes). Still, her photographs seem devoid of political ideology, or indeed any deep hope to effect change. Some of her most grotesque images bear the influence of American photographers like Weegee and Diane Arbus. Another obvious influence is Josef Koudelka, whom Battaglia befriended with her partner Franco Zecchin in 1977. However, the dominant sensibility appears to be a very Italian one, at least as old as Caravaggio. In her high-contrast photos full of dramatic chiaroscuro, the people of Palermo are captured as “creature della vita e del dolore,” in poet Umberto Saba’s words—sinners and sufferers waiting for an (unlikely) deliverance.