Letizia Battaglia (1935-2022) began taking photos when she grew up. She was 40 years old. She wrote notes for a Milan newspaper. At first, her visual results were horrible, by her own definition, but the decisive thing is that she had begun a love affair that stretched to the end of her life.
“I had fallen in love with what I could express with the camera and I couldn’t express it by writing,” he says about that initial crush in the documentary. The mafia photographer, a film by Kim Longinotto that explores the life and work of an exceptional woman. Fearless like no one else. With a look full of courage.
In another passage of the documentary she is heard saying: “I look at my photos and what I see is blood, blood, blood…”. She also remembers the number of times she thought about burning her negative ones.
The testimony points to one of the neuralgic areas of his work. For years, the Italian photojournalist portrayed the climate of violence and bloodbaths produced by the actions of the Sicilian mafia. She also portrayed, as the origin or environment of that nightmare, political corruption, social tensions and the sinking into misery of families without any shelter who had naturalized that children could dream of being hitmen or playing gangster.
There is much more to her work, as can be seen in the generous review proposed by “Letizia Battaglia: chronicle, life, love”, an exhibition that came to Córdoba thanks to the Italian Institute of Culture and is presented at the Palacio Dionisi Photography Museum. .
The visual repertoire, elevated to the rank of social history, expands in records of daily life in the popular neighborhoods of Palermo (his hometown), in scenes of rituals that cover an arc that goes from weddings to wakes, in lunatic faces of people confined in psychiatric hospitals, in his portraits of poorly dressed or naked boys and girls who play with what they have (one of his favorite motifs).
With a crudeness that does not prevent, if necessary, from allowing itself to be inoculated by a beauty that scratches, by a fact of reality that was placed before the eye, Battaglia’s camera captures episodes that could (or could not) reach the pages of the newspapers. : cracked rooms and house collapses, children’s funerals, wives’ femicides, places where desolation beats.
Corpses lying in the streets or abandoned in one room, grieving mothers, widows, children with weapons, all of this mixed with the everyday drifts of a life that bubbles despite everything and becomes a party, a meeting, a kiss.
put the body
Battaglia put his body (not just his eye). In an interview he says that there was a point of madness in his drive to capture the moment, a leap towards risk that was not courage, but unconsciousness.
He suffered countless death threats from Cosa Nostra for his desire to document the hell of pain that the mafia produced, as well as instances of the fight against organized crime, in which many judicial officials lost their lives.
In the exhibition you can see a photo from 1980 that records the moment of the arrest of Leoluca Bagarella, a well-known mafia boss.
The photographer’s granddaughter and one of those responsible for the archive that guards her collection, Marta Sollima, preserves that incident in a text in the exhibition catalogue. She writes: “In the movie Blow-Up (1966), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, David Hemmings discovers that he has accidentally photographed a homicide only after enlarging one of his shots. In my grandmother’s photos something like this would not have happened: she was extremely conscious of what she photographed, the impetus with which she approached the subject often approached the performancelike when, in an attempt to take a close-up shot of the arrest of Leoluca Bagarella, the latter kicked her and almost didn’t kill her.”
His visual chronicle applied to recording the victims, the family mournings, the faces and bodies shaken by horror, was decisive in raising awareness in a society that was floating in a sleep between dread and indifference. In the midst of this tragedy, Battaglia also found a way to put photography in a face-to-face relationship with the part of reality that subsists in the modes of hope and desire.
To see. “Letizia Battaglia: chronicle, life, love” can be visited until July 28 at the Palacio Dionisi Photography Museum (av. Hipólito Yrigoyen 622). From Tuesday to Sunday and holidays, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
