Letizia Battaglia to Direct a New International Centre for Photography in Palermo

The new space will be located into the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, in Palermo. Cultivated for years, the project dedicated to the study and promotion of photography is finally getting its shape in a city increasingly active and contemporary, soon of the Manifesta and Italian Capital of Culture.

Born in Sicily in 1935, Letizia Battaglia began her photography career in the early 1970s and started photographing the Sicilian Mafia in 1974, even receiving death threats. As the photography director of L’Ora, Palermo’s left-wing daily newspaper, she or one of her assistants was present at every major crime scene in the city until shortly before the paper folded in 1990. From these assignments, Battaglia and her long-time partner Franco Zecchin produced many of the iconic photographs that have come to represent Sicily and the Mafia throughout the world.