Letizia Battaglia

A testament to the beauty and violence of life in urban Sicily through 150 unpublished photographs.

Accompanying an exhibition at London's The Photographers' Gallery in autumn 2024, this catalogue presents more than 150 unpublished photographs and prints from the archive of Letizia Battaglia, one of the most important figures of contemporary photography.

Born in Palermo in 1935, Battaglia documented everyday life, alongside the brutal reality of the Mafia and their victims in Sicily from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Her images are some of the best-known records of life in the shadow of the Mafia. In her relentless pursuit against organised crime, she used her camera to document the daily terror, putting it on the front page. Reporting for the daily newspaper L'Ora, she or one of her colleagues, was present at every major crime scene in the city over two decades.

This tender and brutal collection ranges from street protests in Milan to the glamour of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and from religious processions to the violent assassinations carried out by the Mafia. The pictures document the wealth of the area and at the same time the misery of a city almost abandoned to its fate.