Died in Cefalù on April 13, Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia had just celebrated her 87th birthday. She had embodied for two decades the fight against the crimes of Cosa Nostra, the violence of which she had revealed to Italians on the continent as well as to the whole world.
The Franco-Neapolitan photographer Maurizio Leonardi had met her on the eve of his last major retrospective, at the Magazzini fotografici in Naples, at the end of 2019: “ I saw an 84-year-old girl enter the café where we were meeting, jumping from place to place, curious about everything. We had promised to see each other again, then I learned that she had fallen ill. »
This year is an apotheosis for the one who is finally recognized as the greatest Italian photojournalist of the last fifty years. She is the protagonist of Kim Lingotto’s documentary Shooting the mafiacentered on his Cosa Nostra documentation work carried out between the 1970s and the assassination of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
Also in 2019, we can see her in dialogue with the director Franco Maresco in another award-winning documentary in Venice, The Mafia non è più quella di una volta [La mafia n’est plus ce qu’elle était], a sort of tragicomic and poetic drift in a Palermo where the fight against organized crime has sometimes turned into hypocritical folklore. It was filmed two years earlier, on the 25th anniversary of the death of the two judges mentioned above.
A free woman
Born in Palermo, Letizia Battaglia grew up in a bourgeois family at the other end of the peninsula, in Trieste, before returning to her island. Her first fight, she leads him against the patriarchy, that of a father barring her way to studies and that of a husband wishing to lock her into the role of mother at home. “ I have never been a feministshe confided to the Corriere della Sera in 2020, but if I have always behaved as such. I have always been on the side of women. »
Leaving with children and luggage, she begins to bear witness, as a freelance photojournalist, to a mafia violence which is reaching its climax and which the political attacks of the lead years, although less deadly, have completely relegated to the background. From 1974 to 1990, she was director of photography for the daily parlemitain The Ora.
In 1979, she made two shots showing the chairman of the board Giulio Andreotti in the company of a mafia businessman, Nino Salvo. Forgotten, these images will constitute for the police in 1993 the only proof of a link always denied by the politician, both with Cosa nostra and with this criminal whom he claimed to have never met.
A humanist photographer
The same year she founded with her companion the photographer Franco Zecchin the documentation center Peppino Impastato, a young anti-mafia journalist murdered at the age of 27 on May 9, 1978 in Cinisi in Sicily, the same day as Aldo Moro. At that time, the police concluded that it was a suicide, after a conveniently botched investigation.
In 1980, she photographed the future President of the Republic Sergio Matterella, extricating from a car the remains of his brother Piersanti, then President of the Sicilian Region and member of Christian Democracy. After a decade of false leads, the responsibility of the Mafia in this assassination is confirmed by justice.
In 1992, the death of judges Falcone and Borsellino, who were also his friends, led him to stop photographing the violence of Cosa nostra. “These photos, which I never took, hurt me more than the ones I did. They’re all in my head.” she confided later. At the end of the 1990s, she gave up her political responsibilities as mayor of Palermo and worked to reintegrate the small hands of the Mafia who filled many Italian prisons.
Eugene Smith Prize in 1985, Salomon Prize in 2007 and Capa Prize in 2009, his work was shunned little by little by the Italian press, many controlled by Silvio Berlusconi. Its 600,000 photos nevertheless constitute unparalleled testimony to the real civil war that took place on the margins of a country at peace. In black and white, so that the documentary force is not confused with voyeurism, they were taken using simple 24X36 reflex cameras and standard lenses, in the greatest simplicity. Over the decades, they have changed their author into an icon.
For further :
► The traitora film by Marco Bellocchio, presented at Cannes in 2019.
► The drawn autobiography of Roberto Saviano, published in France in 2021.