In Tours, photographer Letizia Battaglia faces the mafia

On April 15, 2022, Palermo buried Letizia Battagliawho died two days earlier at age 87. The entire city mourned the woman who, throughout her life, committed herself to denouncing a daily life woven with misery, violence, unsanitary conditions and corruption. Everyone remembered her improbable hairsometimes electric pink, sometimes blue, sometimes blonde.

Of his astonishing smoking. From his rants on television. From his photos to the daily front page the Hourwhich showed what no one wanted to see – corpses on the sidewalksmothers and wives mad with grief, magistrates under threat, the years of lead [fin des années 1960-début des années 1980] who never stopped.

A retrospective at Palm Game Tours highlights his photographic workawarded three of the most prestigious photo prizes in the world – W. Eugene Smith, Erich-Salomon and Cornell-Capa. But Letizia Battaglia was much more than a free and fearless photographer, railing against the crimes of the Sicilian Mafia. She was journalist, editor, politicianfounder and leader of countless associations, marking with her ardor and her aura an entire city, an entire island.

“I thought they were going to kill me”

Battaglia translates to “battle” in French. Certain names depict an extraordinary destiny. Raised in Palermo after the war, Letizia Battaglia fled a strict family home, marrying a wealthy young man at 16 with whom she settled in Milan. Three children were born from this marriage which collapsed after twenty years, signing its permanent return to Sicily as she approached forty. After starting out as a journalist then photographer in two communist newspapers in Milan, In 1974, she joined the team of the Hourin Palermo, as director of the photo department.