THE HAGUE.- From the early 1970s the Sicilian photojournalist, activist and politician Letizia Battaglia (Palermo 1935 – Cefalù 2022) captured the harsh reality of daily life in and around Palermo, a city plagued by extreme mafia violence, corruption and political power games. Battaglia used photography to highlight injustices: the the mafia’s victims, the traces of violence in public spaces and the consequences for the everyday lives of ordinary Sicilian people. The exhibition can be seen at the Fotomuseum Den Haag from 4 April to 23 August.

Life, Love and Death in Sicily pays tribute to the work and legacy of Letizia Battaglia, a photographer internationally acclaimed for her courage and commitment. Presenting a broad survey of her work from the period 1971–2021, the exhibition shows that her photographic practice extended beyond crime and violence. Battaglia also had an eye for everyday life: women and children in the streets of Palermo, religious rituals, celebrations, mourning and intimacy. Her images show both the poverty and the resilience of a society that suffered for decades from organised crime and widespread corruption.

Battaglia was a self-taught photographer who began her career as a journalist in 1969. For her, photography quickly became a means to draw attention to what many preferred not to see. In the 1970s and 1980s, she attended murder scenes and court cases almost daily. As photo editor of the newspaper L’Ora, she documented hundreds of mafia murders and the police officers, judges and citizens who spoke out against corruption and organised crime.

Battaglia knew Palermo’s neighbourhoods and residents inside and out. Her working method was characterised by a close, long-term involvement with her subjects, returning to photograph them again and again, resulting in compelling images in which violence and vulnerability coexist with tenderness and humanity. Her work came with great personal risk: she received death threats for years but continued to take photographs out of the conviction that visibility is a form of resistance.

Life, Love and Death in Sicily reveals how Battaglia’s personal life and professional work were inextricably interwoven. The exhibition showcases a multifaceted and layered body of work that combines social and political engagement with a humanist vision.

Exhibition and publication

Life, Love and Death in Sicily is Battaglia’s first major retrospective exhibition since her death in 2022. It brings together vintage and new prints with archival materials, contact sheets, books, magazines and films. It has been curated by Paolo Falcone for the Photographers’ Gallery in London in partnership with the Archivio Letizia Battaglia and the Fondazione Falcone per le Arti. It is supported by the Fondazione Candido Speroni e Carla Fendi Speroni, the Italian Cultural Institute in London and Ambra & Antonio Gatti. It is accompanied by a bilingual (Italian/English) publication with more than 150 archive photographs from Battaglia’s forty-year career.

Letizia Battaglia

Letizia Battaglia (Palermo 1935 – Cefalù 2022) was a photojournalist, civil rights activist, publisher, film director, politician and museum director. Her work is represented in the collections of leading museums around the world and is considered an essential visual record of Sicilian life in the second half of the twentieth century. Among the awards she received are the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography (1985), the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Mother Jones International Fund (1999), the Erich Salomon Prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (2007) and the Cornell Capa Infinity Award of the International Center of Photography (2009).