This article is published in issue 17 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 26, 2022
A name that is an oxymoron: Letizia Battaglia, joy and combat. She looks a lot like her. The first time I met Letizia Battaglia she was already going for eighty-five and smoked even where she couldn’t, but without arrogance, with fun. The first thing he asked for was a gin and tonic. But he played, he didn’t need to. She had pink hair and was generous, loving and cheerful. You could see in her face that she had spared nothing in her life. A life that really began only when she understood what she was born to do: photographs. Immediately after the gin and tonic had given me the most beautiful and simple definition of what an author’s creation is: “When I take a photograph it doesn’t matter how beautiful or how well it turned out, but my emotions that come into it at that moment: the things I’ve seen, the writers and people I’ve loved …”. Maybe these weren’t exactly the words, but the meaning was, and it says everything there is to know about art.
00146256 PALERMO MARCH 1999 – PHOTOGRAPHER LETIZIA BATTAGLIA HOLDING A CAT IN HER ARMSPALERMO MARCH 1999 – PHOTOGRAPHER LETIZIA BATTAGLIA HOLDS A CAT IN HER ARMSSHOBHA / CONTRAST
In the book I take the world wherever it is. A life as a photographer between civil commitment and beauty (Einaudi) who published with Sabrina Pisu writes: «…I realize that I have not been born once, my story was not a straight line. I broke and left several times, each time more aware than before. I was born as a person only when I was thirty-nine: it was photography that reinvented me as a woman, that gave me an identity, an autonomy, that made me overcome fears and obstacles. It was the camera, which came into my hands a little by chance, a little out of necessity, that opened the doors of that inner prison in which I had been trapped, making me discover myself and my intimate freedom “.
He was very fond of his freedom, of Palermo and of women’s rights. Last Wednesday night, when I learned that she was gone, I comforted myself with these words from her: «I am more and more convinced that of the people remains what they did in life. I don’t believe in God, nor in destiny. I believe only in the energy of nature and, above all, in social justice ».
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Source: Vanity Fair
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