The photographer who captured the soul of Sicily

A man rests in a street in Palermo, face down, near a pool of blood. His raised T-shirt reveals on his back the tattoo of a face of Jesus. He is part of the thousand victims, most of them anonymous, of the Sicilian mafia Cosa Nostra in the 1980s. This overwhelming image, entitled The two Christis one of the 200 black and white prints of the retrospective that the Château de Tours (Indre-et-Loire) dedicates to Letizia Battaglia and highlights the tireless fight of this photographer Palermitaine (1935-2022) against the organized crime that decimated his island. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the reporter of the newspaper The ora At its risk, at its own risk, the corpses of magistrates or simple citizens, the arrests and the trials of the assassins, the mournings of the families. Still closely, “at the distance of a punch or a caress,” she summed up.

Hope, women, commitment … Sicily Joyeuse by Letizia Battaglia

“Beyond this tragic painting of Sicily which made the famous Letizia Battaglia, we wanted to show the other side of his work: the joy of life of the popular classes, despite the misery,” said the exhibition commissioner, Walter Guadagnini. Over the years, the self -taught photographer, who considers the shooting as the meeting of two souls, immortalizes in tight plan of children playing the ball to Palermo, a resident of the Bourg de Montemaggiore Belsito embroidered on a chair in the sun, or even loved lovers on the green hills of Prizzi. Among these moments of fullness, the clichés of religious festivals hold a place of choice. There is a range of emotions there, from the wonder of the crowd in the face of the appearance of a dove to the meditation of two believers under their veil, a Sunday of Easter.

Day after day, the ordinary columnist offers women to women, especially young girls. His best known portrait represents a kid from the Sicilian capital, a ball in hand, drawn features but the gaze defying the objective. Letizia Battaglia will often say how much she recognized herself in these pre -adolescents determined to realize their dreams, sooner or later. To flee an overprotective father, she was married at 16 with a man who was not long in restraining his ambitions to confine her to the role of housewife. Psychoanalysis had allowed him to emancipate himself and embark on the report at the dawn of the quarantine. In the exclusively male universe of crime scenes – police, legal practitioners or specialists in the news -, he had still had to play elbows to win.

In the mid -1980s, worn out by so many horrors, she took advantage of obtaining the W. Eugene Smith prize, a sort of Oscar from humanist photography, to embrace new horizons. From Turkey to the USSR, passing by Scotland and the United States, it focuses even more on youth, in which it places its hope in the future. But her steps always bring her back to her native city, for which she experiences “a sickly love”. She therefore decides to engage in politics. Ecologist municipal councilor, then deputy to the regional assembly, she tries to directly improve the daily life of her fellow citizens by renovating the architectural heritage, but also by creating green spaces and cultural places.

Letizia Battaglia, a figure in commitment

The elected official still keeps her eye in the viewfinder of her device. In 1992, she produced the undoubtedly the most emblematic image of her work: Rosaria Schifani, widow of a bodyguard of judge Falcone, the eyelids down, between shadow and light, bruised but as a refugee in the secret of her heart. It will be the last of this kind. “In the early 2000s, she began to denounce the economic grip of the mafia, more discreet, by clichés from her real estate empire,” observes Walter Guadagnini. In 2017, Letizia Battaglia opened the Centro Internazionale di Fotografia in her city and exhibited his masters, Josef Koudelka or Mary Ellen Mark. According to Walter Guadagnini, she herself has a number of heirs, starting with the writer Roberto Saviano, whose novel Gomorra In 2006 unveiled the Camorra trafficking, the Neapolitan Hydra. “In Italy, it is a major figure in commitment, which radiates beyond its art. »»