Letizia Battaglia’s crime-scene photographs reflect our complex fascination with images of death and their presence in the media. Documenting the aftermath of violent, Mafia-related murders in the streets of Palermo, Italy, between 1976 and 1991 for the daily newspaper L’Ora, Battaglia’s images exist between factual narrative and popular culture’s fascination with fictional murderers. Battaglia’s hauntingly beautiful compositions demand viewers face the fact that death can be a casual matter, and, while doing so, they encapsulate the relationship between local news outlets—a primary source of information in the pre-internet world—and media consumers. In that sense, the images observe the gradual demise of their own medium.
Curated by Paolo Falcone, “Life, Love and Death in Sicily” was the artist’s first major exhibition in the UK. Born in Palermo in 1935, she began working as a freelance writer in 1969, and in the early 1970s she separated from her husband. With her daughters she moved back from Milan to the Sicilian regional capital to become photography director for L’Ora, but she found the city trapped in a war between Cosa Nostra bosses. The six hundred thousand images she took while working for the paper compose an expansive archive of the economy of random death that took shape in Palermo. In a video interview on display, Battaglia declares that she was “looking for liberty and freedom in all.” By the time she died in 2022, she was an award-winning photojournalist, an environmental activist, a member of Palermo’s city council, and a defender of women’s rights. Battaglia is often compared to American photojournalist Weegee for his candid depiction of crime scenes in Manhattan. Although she shares his sense of visual drama, bold lines, and unexpected compositions, Battaglia differs in her insistence on social advocacy. Perhaps like the Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides, Battaglia brings both the victims and the criminals close to the viewer, producing frames that are both intimate and horrifying.
In the video, Battaglia shares her struggle with seeing so much death and capturing it for others; she speaks of avoiding thoughts about pain and wanting to burn her negatives. It was as if she could hear the crinkling sound of plastic burning, she adds, yearning to rid her images of their beauty. Paradoxically, this visual death wish informs the heightened energy emanating from her pictures. One can almost feel Battaglia’s frustration as she documented the doings of criminals and the magistrates and officers who hunted them (and sometimes were killed in the process), alongside the civic community that was forced to accept cruel disruptions as brute facts of life. In an image from 1980, a barefoot woman dressed in black is being held by police officers as she sobs and yells; her visible pain contrasts with the composed demeanor of the men surrounding her. “Three killers murdered the owner of the Hotel Riva Smeralda,” the label notes. “The woman, not knowing who was killed, thinks it was her son.” Another image, from 1976, captures the exchange of gazes in a murder scene: A dead body lies on the ground in a garage walkway, trapped between the street, a gaping public far in the distance, and the camera, which looks down from a position almost above the man’s bleeding head. The photographer (and we, her work’s viewers) observe the spectacle of the gawkers observing a spectacle of the corpse, recognizing one another’s troubling presence and insatiable curiosity.
Organized in collaboration with her archive, the exhibition, spread across two floors, featured an extensive array of photographs, videos, negatives, and documents—including threatening letters from angry mafiosi. The volume of objects and their display (one gallery was occupied by rows of photographs suspended from the ceiling) expressed both the overwhelming propinquity of the mundane with the unbearable, as well as Battaglia’s own restlessness and passion. The exhibition conveyed the crushing visual saturation Battaglia experienced daily: Crime scenes are flanked by images of religious holidays and receptions for the nobility, young people enjoying themselves, or lovers on the beach. Mourners on the street are equated with devotees in churches, and black-clad widows are juxtaposed with pop stars. The cacophony of scenes and events taints banal incidents with deep foreboding. In this economy of violence, pain and loss possess even the happiest of moments.
