A child aims his gun, in an alley of Palermo. The black-and-white image was shot in 1982, by Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia, who would become world famous for her photographs of bloody mafia settlements in Sicily in the 1970s and 1980s.
Battaglia had been ill for several years, and died late Wednesday evening, at the age of 87, in her hometown of Palermo. Her death sparked a wave of sympathy on social media in Italy, where numerous anti-mafia activists share what she has done for raising awareness about the mafia and the resistance against it.
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In Corleone, a mafia-infested town not far from Palermo, there is an impressive permanent exhibition devoted to her work. Young volunteers explain her photos in detail, and immediately add that talking so openly about the Sicilian mafia was completely unimaginable for earlier generations. The taboo and fear were too great for a long time.
painful images
Even more important than her extensive archive of mafia violence is therefore the debate about the mafia that she has initiated with her powerful, painful images. Letizia Battaglia also made an important contribution to the resistance against organized crime.
The well-known German writer and journalist Petra Reski met her in 1989, during a very first visit to Palermo. Battaglia had already stopped with press photography by then, and had entered local politics. “During a ride in her official car, she didn’t want to talk about her famous photos, but she did list me the names of politicians and mafiosi who had something to do with each other,” Reski recalls. During that car ride, Battaglia told extensively about the intertwining of crime and politics, so that the German would report about it in the foreign press. That car ride had an impact; Petra Reski later wrote several books on organized crime in Italy.
Reski: “During that car ride she was also incessantly calling into her phone – she already had it, in 1989. During every phone call I heard her shout ‘Amore mio’ loudly before she set off, and it was for me that impossible to know whether she was talking to her lover, the gardener, or another anti-mafia activist. Letizia Battaglia was one lump of commitment.”
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