Audio description in galleries and museums aims to make visual information accessible using verbal description. The Photographers' Gallery has, for several years, also linked audio description to slow looking and to visual literacy.

The audio files for an introduction to the exhibition and five audio descriptions for five works in the exhibition are below. A transcript of each audio description is also available.

These audio descriptions have been produced by Eleanor Margolies, a writer and audio describer. She has a background in puppetry and theatre design, with interests in ecology and the role of the senses in performance. She audio describes in museum, theatre and dance contexts.

About: Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily

The Photographers’ Gallery presents a solo show of work by Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia (1935-2022).

Born in Palermo, Sicily in 1935, Battaglia began her photographic career in the early 1970s, when she was in her forties. She documented everyday life, alongside the brutal reality of the Mafia and their victims in Sicily during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Her images are some of the best-known records of life in the shadow of the Mafia. In her relentless pursuit against organised crime, she used her camera to document the daily terror, putting it on the front page. Reporting for the daily newspaper L’Ora, she or one of her colleagues, was present at every major crime scene in the city over two decades. 

Battaglia mainly photographed in black and white. She also captured daily life: women and children in their neighbourhoods and streets, showing the wealth of the area and at the same time the misery of a city almost abandoned to its fate. Her pictures capture the poverty on the streets as well as the life of the upper classes, religious processions, festivals, funerals and much more.