In Tours, an exhibition honors Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia – L’Express

“The aircraft arrived in my hands a little by chance, a little out of need, and he opened the doors of my inner prison,” said Letizia Battaglia to his friend Sabrina Pisu, a few years before her death. From this river interview between the photographer and the journalist was born a book in 2020, the French version of which appeared in January at Actes Sud. I take over the world wherever it is Traces the intimate and artistic journey of Letizia Battaglia, passed to posterity for her clichés on the murders perpetrated by Cosa Nostra from 1960 to 1990. In the second part of this work as dense as exciting, Sabrina Pisu deciphers the changes in Italian journalism, the mafia and the context of lead years in the boot.

At the same time, the Jeu de Paume unrolls, at the Château de Tours, a retrospective to the Sicilian photographer who disappeared in April 2022, with the collaboration of the Letizia Battaglia archives, kept in Palermo, and the center of Camera Torino photography. Nearly 200 black and white prints shed light on the trajectory of a courageous woman who, in addition to her contribution punch to mafia iconography, also captured the life of her compatriots, with a predilection for female figures. We cannot advise too much to associate the visit of this exhibition with the reading of the book – better contextualized – mentioned above.

Born in 1935 in a bourgeois environment, married from the age of 16 to a man who confined it to the domestic sphere, the palermitaine with suffocated aspirations will wait for the end of the thirties to become “a person in its own right”. Depression, psychoanalysis and the beginnings in the press as a freelancer on the left daily The ora will make it happen to itself. In Milan, where, after her divorce, she is postponed to support her daughters, she seizes the small black box in self -taught, crossing intellectuals on her way, such as the future Nobel Prize Dario Fo and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini with which she establishes a lasting friendship. Back in Palermo in 1974, promoted director of photography at The oraLetizia Battaglia is the visual witness of the bloody wars between mafia clans. His strong images, framed to the tightest, bring him the reputation. Among his most famous shots are the muscular arrest of Leocula Bagarella, merciless killer of Cosa Nostra, or the poignant distress of the future head of state Sergio Mattarella hugging his brother against him.

After the assassination, in 1992, of the Antimafia Judges Falcone and Borsellino, of which she was near, Letizia Battaglia ceases to document mafia crimes, but continues to grasp the contrasts of her island, between extreme destitution and tape-to-l’oeil, traditional religious festivals and funeral rituals. Activist, feminist, environmentalist, elected municipal and then deputy, she militates tirelessly for the safeguarding of the historic center of her city gangled by corruption and for the human rights of women, children or psychiatric internees. Winner of the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Prize in 1985, she will travel Le Monde, her leica as a shoulder. Türkiye, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, United States or Sicily, same fight. That of a committed woman, convinced of the social function of the objective.