Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia became famous for capturing the extremely violent mafia wars in Sicily in the 1970s and 1980s. She died on Wednesday in Palermo at the age of 87.
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In her photos, corpses can be seen in pools of blood on sidewalks or left carelessly by the side of a rural road. In other work, she emphasized the impact the mafia had on the rest of the population. She also regularly photographed exorbitantly luxurious parties and weddings of mafia members.
She was threatened with death several times for her work. “I did what I could to awaken consciences by showing not only the violent killings, but also the poverty caused by the mafia,” she said.
In 2019 her work could count on renewed attention when she was the subject of the documentary Shooting the maffia by British filmmaker Kim Longinotto. The film received the audience award at the Brussels International Film Festival in 2019. Over the years, Battaglia had several solo exhibitions. A permanent exhibition of her work can be seen in her native city of Palermo.
‘Archive of Blood’
Battaglia’s archive consists of more than half a million photos and is so extensive that police investigators once consulted it to prove who had attended a political rally decades earlier. She once labeled her archive as ‘an archive of blood’.
The mayor of Palermo on Thursday called her a “standard bearer on the path of liberating the city of Palermo from mafia rule.”
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