Our interview with photographer Letizia Battaglia, who documented the Mafia massacres and is working on a project dedicated to the female body.
In the 1970s Palermo seemed like a battlefield, where almost every day someone was killed in the street. Amid the crowd of journalists, one woman — just one — would always turn up at the crime scene, with her camera. The police cordons would routinely try to push her away. To get the shots she needed, she was forced to start shouting: "Why do you let the RAI through and not me? Why do you let the men through and not me?" She shouted so loudly that she filled the officers with embarrassment, and they eventually gave in and let her do her work. She was Letizia Battaglia, the first female photographer to be taken on staff by an Italian daily newspaper.
I had fallen in love with what I could express with the camera that I couldn't express through writing. Letizia Battaglia
During her nineteen years in the service of Palermo's newspaper L'Ora, Letizia Battaglia immortalised dozens of corpses — victims of the Mafia massacres — but also their killers, making them appear not as charismatic bosses but as coarse, slovenly figures ("Think about how the Mafiosi felt being photographed by a woman," she would later remark). On several occasions her shots became crucial evidence in trials. It comes as no surprise, then, that for a long time she was hounded by anonymous letters, death threats and people spitting at her in the street. Nor does it come as a surprise that today, twenty-five years after the murders of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, she no longer speaks willingly about the Mafia.
My life has been a struggle without my even knowing it. Letizia Battaglia
The photographs she loves most, however, are those of ordinary people and of little girls from the working-class neighbourhoods of Palermo. Images of rare intensity, born not only from their subjects but also from the author's ability to build empathy and immerse herself in reality without prejudice.
Today Letizia Battaglia is a sharp-minded and exuberant eighty-four-year-old with a pink bob and a cigarette perpetually lit between her fingers. We met her at the WeWorld Festival, where she presented the documentary Shooting the Mafia, which retraces her life by tying it inextricably to one of the most tragic periods in Italian history. Presented at Sundance, the Berlinale and the London Film Festival, the film is directed by British filmmaker Kim Longinotto and will be in Italian cinemas from 1 December.
Today we will see the documentary Shooting the Mafia, one of the first occasions on which you are not the one doing the telling, but the one being told. What was that experience like?
Embarrassing. It was embarrassing and in part it doesn't convince me. But it is a documentary that is useful above all for younger generations: it's important to see that there is a woman like this, who isn't me… but is me.
What is the value of photography today?
Photography has the same value you put into life, into eating, into walking, into choosing to visit an exhibition. Everything in life has value. I no longer give photography greater value because it made me famous — on the contrary: I give greater value to love, to respect. You must not let yourself be bewitched by success or by other people's words; you have to keep on living, doing, producing. I always want to reinvent my life — I cannot remain tied to photography. Fine, I have taken photographs, my photos are well known and they have served (perhaps) to tell the story of what we suffered in Sicily, I have worked a great deal, but I cannot remain chained to photography. I want to do other things, I want to keep on living. I have a future, even at 84.
Today we find ourselves at a festival dedicated to women. You have always photographed a great many women and young girls, and your next project will be dedicated to them too. Can you tell us what it involves?
Over the next two years I hope to create a project called Palermo Nuda, depicting women in the nude. Not only beautiful women, but women as a symbol of life, of the earth, of beauty — not of sexuality, because that is a more private matter. I find photographs that allude to sensuality in a banal way repellent, because it is something deep, bound up with the psyche and with personal experience, which cannot be enclosed in a single shot. If from a person there emerges an eroticism, that is another matter, but my photography must respect women's privacy. I don't like photographing men, because I believe in women more and I have greater empathy towards them. To me, men are a little false, treacherous, not straightforward, and some of them even kill us: why on earth should I photograph them?
You live happily in Palermo. A city that carries a heavy history, which you helped to document, but which is also changing a great deal.
Palermo is changing a great deal; some people don't want to admit it, but it is moving forward. Not everything is resolved, but it is making progress. There is more vitality, more desire not to be prisoners of the Mafia and of taboos. We haven't solved every problem, but we have had a good mayor for many years and that has helped a great deal, because the Mafia no longer came into the town hall to do business — and before, it did. That alone is a great deal. And then people go out at night, girls go around on their own — it's no longer the way it was in my day.
From 5 December 2019 to 19 January 2020, the rooms of Palazzo Reale in Milan will host the exhibition "Storie di strada", featuring over three hundred photographs (many of them previously unpublished) that will retrace the professional history of the great Sicilian artist. This is the first event in the series "I talenti delle donne", commissioned by the City of Milan, which throughout 2020 will offer initiatives and performances linked to women at the forefront of culture.
The tenth edition of the WeWorld Festival, held at the Teatro Litta in Milan on 23 and 24 November, closed with a screening of Shooting the mafia and a discussion between Letizia Battaglia and Danilo De Blasio (director of the Festival dei diritti umani). This year too, WeWorld Onlus chose to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women with an event open to all and packed with content.
Guest of honour was writer Roberto Saviano, who performed an original monologue dedicated to the women and children Italy is leaving behind, amid school dropout and abuse. Also taking to the stage were Ledi Meingati, an activist fighting female genital mutilation and early marriage in Kenya; actress Donatella Finocchiaro, with her monologue about Sicilian storyteller Rosa Balistreri; the satirical collective Terzo Segreto di Satira, which presented the web series produced in Mozambique with WeWorld Onlus; and many others.
