Letizia Battaglia, Vita, amore e morte in Sicilia (Italian version), 2026

*Letizia Battaglia* is the catalogue published to accompany the solo exhibition open to the public from 8 October 2024 to 23 February 2025 at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, curated by Paolo Falcone, in collaboration with the Letizia Battaglia Archive, the Falcone Foundation for the Arts, and with the support of Candido Speroni and the Carla Fendi Speroni Foundation, as well as the Italian Cultural Institute in London.
Both the exhibition and the catalogue bear witness to Italian life and society through photographs drawn from the historical archive of this great photographer. For some fifty years, Letizia Battaglia photographed, observed and lived her era intensely, and above all her city, Palermo. *Letizia Battaglia* is a tribute to her work, her intense and fresh perspective, her yearning for freedom and her constant defiance of convention. An unbroken chronicle that moves from Milan to the face of Pier Paolo Pasolini, from the many victims of the Mafia to the unassuming elegance of the little girls in Palermo’s Cala neighbourhood; and then the religious processions, the faces of Piersanti Mattarella and Giovanni Falcone, right through to the ruthless boss Leoluca Bagarella.
For some fifty years, Letizia Battaglia has photographed, observed and lived through her era and, above all, her city, Palermo. Letizia Battaglia is a tribute to her work, her intense and fresh perspective, her yearning for freedom and her constant defiance of convention.

As Shoair Mavlian, director of the Photographers’ Gallery in London, writes, Letizia Battaglia’s images could be viewed “through the lens of life; something chaotic, random, unpredictable, cruel and dangerous, yet also full of love and empathy”. Accompanied by an essay by Paolo Falcone, the book’s editor, the photographs now unfold in a single, formidable sequence where “photographers and everyday life converge in a single journey that highlights the extraordinary visual sensitivity and the courage to be just a punch or a caress away from capturing the image – often taken in extreme circumstances but always full of dignity”.