Letizia Battaglia, pioneer photographer who defied the Mafia, dead at 87

[April 14, 2022]  By Philip Pullella

ROME (Reuters) - Letizia Battaglia, a world-renowned photographer whose courageous work documenting the Mafia's stranglehold on her native Sicily was at once chilling and poignant, has died. She was 87.

Battaglia, who died in the Sicilian capital Palermo late on Wednesday, photographed the brutal Mafia wars of the 1980s and 1990s, showing political assassinations and dead bodies in pools of blood on sidewalks or abandoned on the side of a rural road.

She was equally famous for pictures depicting the Mafia's impact on Sicilians, from a boy playing "hitman" by wearing a nylon stocking over his face and holding a toy gun to a grieving widow of a Mafia victim at a funeral.

"I did what I could to shake consciences by showing not only violent deaths but also the poverty caused by the Mafia," Battaglia once said.

"She documented the atrocities of the Mafia long before it was popular or safe to do so," Alexander Stille, author of "Excellent Cadavers," a landmark book about the Mafia, wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1999.

Among her other work, Battaglia documented what Italians called "Sicilia bene," the high society world of her native island comprising the wealthy and influential, members of which often had links to politics and organised crime.

"Palermo loses an extraordinary woman, a reference point," said Leoluca Orlando, the Sicilian capital's current mayor and fellow anti-Mafia reformist when he held the same post during the most ferocious clan wars three decades ago.

Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia smiles during an interview with Reuters in this still image taken from a video, in Palermo, Italy April 21, 2006. Video taken April 21, 2006. REUTERS TV via REUTERS

"Letizia Battaglia was an internationally recognised symbol, a flag bearer on the path of liberation of the city of Palermo from governance by the Mafia," he said.

Her archives of more than half a million pictures 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 "an archive of blood".

A woman in what was traditionally a man's world, she held numerous solo exhibitions and was the subject of several film documentaries, including the 2019 "Shooting the Mafia" by British filmmaker Kim Longinotto.

An activist who worked to save Palermo's older Baroque neighbourhoods from real estate developers, she advocated for women's rights and several times served on the Palermo city council and the Sicilian regional assembly in the 1980s and 1990s.

(Additional reporting by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

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