Letizia Battaglia: In Search of Life

This exhibition traces the uncompromising career of Letizia Battaglia through more than 100 works from her archive, including photographs, magazines, books, and press material. Together, they reflect the breadth of her visual language and her tireless social commitment.

Battaglia begins in the late 1960s between Palermo and Milan, writing and photographing for magazine features that document shifting social and sexual norms in Italy. Her turning point comes in the mid-1970s, when she returns to Palermo to work for the newspaper L’Ora. For over a decade, she photographs the daily brutality of Mafia violence—images that become defining documents of a wounded city.

But Battaglia’s eye also captures resilience. Her portraits show the richness of Sicilian life: religious festivals, the beauty of youth, daily hardship, and the emotional landscape of a psychiatric hospital. Her lens never simplifies—she portrays both pain and dignity with equal clarity.

After receiving the W. Eugene Smith Grant in 1985, Battaglia expands her focus to the USSR, the US, Turkey, and Iceland, without abandoning her humanist vision. Photography, she writes, is “the story of life… I become the world, and the world becomes me.”

The exhibition also highlights her editorial work and activism from the mid-1980s onwards, offering a fuller view of her practice—where photography, publishing, and politics meet.