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Letizia Battaglia at an exhibition in Toulouse 2016
Photo:
ERIC CABANIS / AFP
Dead bodies in pools of blood on sidewalks or abandoned by the side of a country road: testimonies to the violence perpetrated by the Sicilian mafia.
Between 1974 and 1990, Letizia Battaglia documented the stranglehold with which Cosa Nostra tightened its homeland of Sicily in images that were as frightening as they were poignant.
Her haunting footage showed widows screaming, bodies riddled with bullets.
A boy playing killer with a nylon stocking over his face and a toy gun in his hand.
Or a dead body that Battaglia discovered one morning in 1980 next to a stack of orange crates.
»The whole thing was like a play, there was absolute silence.
What I saw wounded me deep inside," Battaglia once told SPIEGEL.
Battaglia secretly listened to the police radio and was often the first to arrive at the crime scene.
»In order not to cry, scream or throw up, I rushed to police headquarters immediately after the photo and checked the name of the mafia victim this time.
Then I ran to the darkroom and developed the photo,” said the photojournalist from the communist daily newspaper L'Ora, for which she was working at the time.
»Fighting Photographer«
Put as a child by his father in a convent school and locked up at home in the afternoon because girls were not allowed to play outside in Palermo at the time, Battaglia married at the age of 16.
When she wanted to study after the birth of her three daughters, her husband said she was crazy.
After 15 years of marriage, Letizia suffered a nervous breakdown, separated from her husband and went to Milan with their daughters.
When she later returned to her hometown of Palermo, she launched the war against Cosa Nostra as a »fotografa militante«, as Battaglia called herself »a militant photographer«: »I kept pressing the shutter button to shoot Sicily from the scourge of the mafia.« The plan was not harmless: »The men threatened, insulted and hit me several times, and a few times they destroyed my camera.« The mafiosi also tried to downplay the photographer with letters and telephone calls.
"Get out of Palermo or you'll be dead!" was written on a piece of paper that she once had in her mailbox.
Battaglia was not intimidated by this.
“I had no choice.
Something in me kept pushing me, a natural urge to fight for justice, respect and love,” Battaglia said.
600,000 testimonies of horror
In the early 1990s, the activist and women's rights activist put down her camera.
"When Berlusconi came to power, I knew we would never defeat organized crime," Battaglia said.
"All my fighting was useless at all," was her conclusion.
Many people see it differently.
Her archive of around 600,000 photos was so extensive that police investigators consulted it once to find out who had attended a political rally decades earlier.
"Palermo is losing an exceptional woman, a point of reference," said Leoluca Orlando, the current mayor of the Sicilian capital and a comrade in the fight against the mafia, when he held office during the fiercest clan wars three decades ago: "Letizia Battaglia was an internationally recognized Symbol, a flag-bearer on the road to liberating the city of Palermo from mafia rule.«
Letizia Battaglia died in her hometown of Palermo on Wednesday evening.
She was 87 years old.
sak/Reuters