Letizia Battaglia - Vintage Prints

Born in Palermo in 1935, Letizia Battaglia is probably the most famous and awarded Italian photojournalist in the world, a long career marked by a passionate social and political commitment. The exhibit at the Galleria del Cembalo presents to the public some of her most famous photo shoots, sometimes followed by a second gaze of the same situation, often printed as unique piece in the darkroom.

The forty small-format prints come from Letizia Battaglia’s personal archive and were selected by the photographer herself together with the curators of the exhibition. Each of them has a story, which increases the evocative power of the images and which is outlined by what is present on their rear side: the several stamps of the author and those of the agencies that used to give her reports to newspapers and magazines, the notes and records for the black and white printing process, the handwritten captions.

Taken between the 1970s and the early 1990s, most of the photographs record the life in Palermo and its complex reality in those years, from mob killings to precarious conditions of children “at risk”, from poor districts’ life to aristocratic parties. Together with the “Italian shots” the exhibit shows some images taken abroad, for example in Arkhangelsk, U.S.S.R, in the psychiatric department of a women’s prison in Madrid, and in New York (1986), where Letizia Battaglia received the New York Times Award and where the previous year she also won the W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant – the first European woman to receive that prize.