Beauty, and harsh reality, lie in the eyes of the "photographer"

We retrace the not always easy life, achievements and difficulties of Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia

On 13 April, she left, the woman whose photographs had portrayed life in all its various facets, even the most tragic: madness, the Mafia, the contradictions of her land, traditions, people, violence, beauty, streets, the poor and women. Of her land, Sicily, and of Palermo, Letizia Battaglia has photographed much, almost everything, but above all she has told the story of the women of that land, often in a vivid and intense black and white.

The feminine has remained a constant theme in the works of this extraordinary photographer. She married early, divorced when this was still unacceptable to much of

of "well-thinking" society.

The female figure has always been the focus of her shots, as if to give it space, to represent the female condition in order to redeem it, to give it visibility.

Let us also consider that Letizia began photographing in the 1960s, when she was 30 years old. She had difficulty inserting herself in an environment like that of photography that was still profoundly misogynist and patriarchal. If we consider that male and female adultery was punished differently until 1968 and that honour killings and reparative marriages were abolished in 1981, we have an idea of the historical period in which the photographer operates.

Letizia, in fact, a free and independent woman, encountered many difficulties in establishing herself nationally and internationally, looked down upon by her colleagues, often excluded and marginalised in a world of male chauvinism and sexism. This is probably also why the status of women has always been a priority for her.

Letizia is indeed a photographer or, as she likes to call herself, 'a person who loves to take pictures' but is, perhaps,

even more, always been interested in society and social issues.

In fact, she has always favoured subjects from the lower socio-cultural strata of the population and many of her photos were taken in the working-class neighbourhoods of her city,

Palermo.

The famous photo 'the girl with the ball', perhaps the most famous of the artist's shots, is emblematic in this way. It portrays a pre-teen playing ball in the Cala, a working-class neighbourhood in Palermo. The girl is represented with raw realism, capturing her facial expressions without judgement and/or moralism of any kind. The beauty of Letizia's photos lies precisely in her ability to represent reality in its entirety, trying not to interpret it but to represent it. The choice of 'black and white' is not accidental and probably the desire to privilege content over form, meaning over aesthetics.

The representation of Sicilian realities is 360 degrees but the weak, the poor, the marginalised are favoured precisely because of the social and ethical value that photography has for Letizia Battaglia.

Violence is also represented but not with cruelty nor with the focus of sensationalism typical of our time.

Bound to her land in a strong but bitter way, aware of its wonders but also of its ugliness, Letizia immortalises the main events of the Mafia in the historical period of the massacres. Letizia Battaglia, in fact, besides being the photographer of women, of the poor, of life, is also the one who bears witness, perhaps more than anyone else, to the Sicilian history of those years.

Brutal in their harshness, her shots of the murders of Piersanti Mattarella, Judge Terranova and many other mafia victims. He also immortalised the meeting between Ignazio and Nino Salvo, Giulio Andreotti outside the Zagaria hotel and Peppino Impastato's mother in front of the photo of her murdered son.

These and many others are her shots that have gone down in history. Always ready to recount and capture painful moments in Sicilian and Italian history. As she herself recounts, often 'the only woman alone in a world of men, policemen, judges, forensic doctors, photographers' she would run back and forth, to try to remember, immortalise and not let the memory of mafia actions and their violence towards those who tried to oppose them be lost.

After the death of Judge Falcone on 23 May 1992, she decided to stop her representation of the Mafia massacres. She then moved to Paris but, never tamed, she continued to bear her testimony and social commitment through dissemination and awareness-raising activities. Thanks also to a course of psychotherapy that she has never made a secret of, she has made her fragility her strong point, even going through a bad bout of depression.

Not even the disease, a tumour with which she lived the last years of her existence, stopped her, she energetic and unstoppable.

Empathetic, indomitable, interested but above all passionate, she recounted thirty years of Sicilian and Italian history with her shots. The photography with which she managed to recount so well the life to which she was attached in every aspect, allowed her to cheat death and secure her place in the history of photography.

All images are property of © Letizia Battaglia