Letizia Battaglia: Passion Justice Freedom – Photographs of Sicily
Aperture (Burden Gallery)
20 East 23rd Street
October 16 – December 31, 2001

By Marguerite Shore

There has been a great deal of discussion lately, questioning whether art can provide a legitimate response to disaster, or if art that addresses a tragedy on the scale of the attacks on the World Trade Center in fact trivializes the event. The work of Letizia Battaglia, on view at Aperture’s Burden Gallery and featured in an Aperture publication from 1999 (see www.aperture.org) illustrates how art can both respond to desperate conditions and provide an avenue of hope, a way out of despair.

Letizia Battaglia can be tagged with many labels – photographer, political activist, feminist, environmentalist – none of which adequately convey who she is. Since the 1970s Battaglia has been documenting life in her native Sicily – its tragedies and violence, its stoicism and dignity. Rarely has an artist been bestowed with such an appropriate name: Letizia means joy, Battaglia means battle, and these two poles define the emotional territory that her work inhabits. While she started out as a photojournalist, Battaglia transcends the confines of that field and imbues every image with a timeless nobility and humanity. For several years she stopped taking pictures and officially entered the world of politics, standing for election and serving on the city council. She was instrumental in saving and reviving the historic center of Palermo, established her own publishing house and is deeply involved in working for the rights of women and, most recently, prisoners.

Much of Battaglia’s work documents the brutality of the Mafia: corpses, grieving widows, bloodstained streets. What is striking is the conflict between acceptance and outrage. Groups of onlookers, stoical and beyond shock, have seen it all before. Mourners wracked by sobs seem to be playing out a tragedy that defines every chapter of their lives. But Battaglia refuses to accept this reality. Her lens moves in too close for comfort, capturing a moment that is not meant to be seen, a scene that perhaps will be set back in order, hurriedly, as soon as possible (Fig 1).

Battaglia’s proximity to her subjects is unblinkingly honest, but it is never cruel. Her photographs of psychiatric patients expose the dimensions of their world without condescension. Most of Battaglia’s subjects either avoid the camera or are caught unawares. Mafiosi on trial, of course, would rather be elsewhere and look away in shame or defiance. Aristocrats at a gala party are as oblivious to the photographer as they are to the wider surrounding world. But there are some notable exceptions. Her portraits of children, particularly young girls, pay tribute to their eerie, prematurely adult beauty. Interestingly, these adolescent girls openly return the camera’s gaze. It seems to be a complicit glance, charged with a conspiratorial understanding of life’s inequity and harshness. Another powerful image in the exhibition – a young mother whose child has been bitten by a rat during the night – atypically looks straight into the camera, honestly acknowledging her plight, yet more heroic than resigned. One of the most emotionally laden and direct glances is exchanged between the photographer and Magistrate Roberto Scarpinato. It was Scarpinato who was the lead prosecutor in the trial of former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (who was acquitted). Scarpinato stands erect and stares ahead, enveloped in sadness. His entourage of bodyguards looks away (Fig 2).

The image used for Aperture’s Burden Gallery announcement is one of Battaglia’s most formally elegant works (Fig 3). It is a portrait of Rosaria Schifani, widow of the bodyguard for Judge Giovanni Falcone, who was assassinated with the Judge in 1992. Schifani spoke out eloquently at the state funeral, and in Battaglia’s photograph, her face is cut vertically by a black shadow. Emerging from the shadows, she could be a symbol of present-day Sicily, half-trapped in ancient rituals and blood feuds, half-released into the sunlight.

I spoke to Battaglia in early October, conveying a message from Melissa Harris, Senior Editor at Aperture and curator of this exhibition. Harris wanted Battaglia to know that she would understand if the photographer decided to forego her trip to New York, given the difficulties of post-September 11th life in the city, and the specific rigors of airline travel. Typically, Battaglia was indignant and insisted that she had to come to New York, now more than ever, to show her solidarity. Once here, the city’s sadness and sense of depletion struck her. She has seen her own city under attack, albeit one of a different nature and duration, and she has seen her country wounded and fearful. She knows, better than most, that courage can uncover the power to endure and to heal.