Exhibition Tour: Letizia Battaglia - Life Love and Death in Sicily

06:30pm - 07:15pm, Thu 05 Dec 2024

An informal tour of the exhibition, free with general admission

Black and white photograph of two women sat outside a car. They are both busy crocheting.

Exhibition Tour: Letizia Battaglia - Life Love and Death in Sicily

6:30pm, Thu 05 Dec 2024

An informal tour of the exhibition, free with general admission

This event is part of our Past Programme

Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily is the first major exhibition in the UK following her death in 2022. Join this tour with one of The Photographers' Gallery's curators to gain more insight into the exhibition.

Born in Palermo, Sicily in 1935, Battaglia began her photographic career in the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-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.

 Installation of Shirley Baker's Women, Children and Loitering Men, 2015

Explore the Archive: Street Photography Collection

To coincide with Letizia Battaglia's Life, Love and Death in Sicily, view material from past exhibitions that investigated street photography at The Photographers' Gallery.

View Street Photography Collection