Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia smiles throughout an interview with Reuters on this nonetheless picture taken from a video, in Palermo, Italy April 21, 2006. Video taken April 21, 2006. REUTERS TV through REUTERS
ROME, April 14 (Reuters) – Letizia Battaglia, a world-renowned photographer whose brave work documenting the Mafia’s stranglehold on her native Sicily was without delay chilling and poignant, has died. She was 87.
Battaglia, who died within the Sicilian capital Palermo late on Wednesday, photographed the brutal Mafia wars of the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties, displaying political assassinations and lifeless our bodies in swimming pools of blood on sidewalks or deserted on the aspect of a rural highway.
She was equally well-known for photos depicting the Mafia’s influence on Sicilians, from a boy taking part in “hitman” by sporting a nylon stocking over his face and holding a toy gun to a grieving widow of a Mafia sufferer at a funeral.
“I did what I may to shake consciences by displaying not solely violent deaths but additionally the poverty brought on by the Mafia,” Battaglia as soon as stated.
“She documented the atrocities of the Mafia lengthy earlier than it was common or protected to take action,” Alexander Stille, writer of “Glorious Cadavers,” a landmark e book concerning the Mafia, wrote within the New York Overview of Books in 1999.
Amongst her different work, Battaglia documented what Italians known as “Sicilia bene,” the excessive society world of her native island comprising the rich and influential, members of which frequently had hyperlinks to politics and organised crime.
“Palermo loses a rare girl, a reference level,” stated Leoluca Orlando, the Sicilian capital’s present mayor and fellow anti-Mafia reformist when he held the identical submit throughout probably the most ferocious clan wars three a long time in the past.
“Letizia Battaglia was an internationally recognised image, a flag bearer on the trail of liberation of the town of Palermo from governance by the Mafia,” he stated.
Her archives of greater than half 1,000,000 photos had been so in depth that police investigators as soon as consulted them for proof of who had attended a political rally a long time earlier. They had been a part of what she as soon as known as “an archive of blood”.
A girl in what was historically a person’s world, she held quite a few solo exhibitions and was the topic of a number of movie documentaries, together with the 2019 “Taking pictures the Mafia” by British filmmaker Kim Longinotto.
An activist who labored to save lots of Palermo’s older Baroque neighbourhoods from actual property builders, she advocated for girls’s rights and several other occasions served on the Palermo metropolis council and the Sicilian regional meeting within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties.
Extra reporting by Crispian Balmer
Modifying by Bernadette Baum
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