The famous Italian photojournalist Letizia Batalia, best known for her work on documenting the mafia and their victims in Sicily, has died at the age of 87.
Armed only with her Leica camera and mounted on a Vespa, Battaglia roamed the streets of Palermo in the 1970s and 1980s, photographing victims of mafia killings and civil wars between rival clans. As a result, she received several death threats.
Born and raised in post-war Palermo, she moved with her family to northern Italy and married at 16. But after a divorce and a three-year stay in Milan, she returned to Sicily with her longtime partner Franco Zechin in 1974.
A child with a gun in Palermo, 1982. Photo: Leticia Batalia
Her ambition was to be a writer, but her journalistic career ended when she first took a camera at the age of 40. “I thought, ‘With this in my hand, I can take the world,'” she once told the Guardian.
During these years, the war between mafia families in and around Palermo resulted in hundreds of deaths. The Corleone clan decided to conquer the city by killing its rivals, along with dozens of police officers, judges and politicians who were trying to stop the war.
“Those were terrible years,” Batalia said in another interview in 2017. You no longer knew who your friends or enemies were. In the morning you left the house and did not know if you would return in the evening. The bosses could blow my head off at any moment.
Donna learns that her son was killed, 1980. Photo: Leticia Batalia
“When the police stopped them, I approached them as close as possible to photograph them in handcuffs. I wanted the bosses to look me in the eye, even at the cost of spitting in my face. It was also a way for me to challenge the mafia. “
The 600,000 iconic images she painted helped unravel the brutal reality of the mafia and its victims in Sicily.
“Suddenly I had a blood archive,” she once said.
The shocking, transgressive images of bodies taken by Batalia were included in a 2019 documentary about her life, entitled “Mafia Shooting”.
Batalia has been ill for some time and died late Wednesday in the Sicilian capital, sparking an outcry on social media.
“Palermo has lost an extraordinary woman,” said Leoluca Orlando, mayor of Palermo and a friend of Batalia. “Letizia Batalia was an internationally recognized symbol in the art world. She was an extraordinary person who made visible what was invisible. “
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