Letizia Battaglia, a world-renowned photographer whose courageous work documenting Mafia rule in her native Sicily was both terrifying and poignant, has died. She was 87 years old.
Battaglia, who died in the Sicilian capital Palermo on Wednesday night, photographed the brutal mafia wars of the 1980s and 1990s, showing political assassinations and corpses in pools of blood on sidewalks or abandoned beside a rural road.
She was equally famous for photos depicting the Mafia’s impact on Sicilians, from a boy playing “assassin” wearing a nylon stocking over his face and holding a toy gun to a grieving widow of a Mafia victim in a funeral.
“I did what I could to shake consciences, showing not only the violent deaths but also the poverty caused by the mafia,” Battaglia once said.
“She documented Mafia atrocities long before it was popular or safe to do so,” wrote Alexander Stille, author of “Excellent Cadavers,” a reference book on the Mafia, in the New York Review of Books in 1999.
Among his other works, Battaglia documented what Italians called “Sicilia bene”, the high society world of his native island, comprising the wealthy and influential, whose members often had ties to politics and organized crime.
“Palermo loses an extraordinary woman, a point of reference,” said Leoluca Orlando, the current mayor of the Sicilian capital and fellow anti-mafia reformer when she held the same post during the fiercest clan wars three decades ago.
“Letizia Battaglia was an internationally recognized symbol, a flag-bearer on the road to liberating the city of Palermo from the mafia rule,” he said.
Their archives of more than half a million photos were so extensive that police investigators once consulted them for evidence of who had attended a political rally decades earlier. They were part of what she once called “a file of blood.”
A woman in what was traditionally a male world, she has held numerous solo exhibitions and been the subject of numerous film documentaries, including British filmmaker Kim Longinotto’s 2019 “Shooting the Mafia”.
An activist who worked to save Palermo’s older Baroque neighborhoods from real estate developers, she championed women’s rights and several times served on Palermo’s city council and Sicily’s regional assembly in the 1980s and 1990s.
Source: CNN Brasil
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