July 18th, 2025
Germano D'Acquisto
Letizia Battaglia's militant photography in Arles
Letizia has pursued life, with its wrinkles, dust, real tears, and unadorned smiles, throughout her career, with a Leica in her bag and urgency in her gaze.
If photography is a form of activism, Letizia Battaglia has been its gentle commander. Gentle, yes, but only in the most incendiary sense of the word. At the Rencontres d'Arles, which treats photography as a secular religion and intellectual pilgrimage, the exhibition she deserves has finally arrived: J'ai toujours cherché la vie. And life, with its wrinkles, dust, real tears, and unadorned smiles, is what Letizia pursued throughout her career, with a Leica in her bag and urgency in her gaze.
The retrospective, from July 7 to October 5, organized with rigor and grace by Walter Guadagnini, is a journey through time and space, but without any nostalgia. The more than one hundred works—photographs, magazine covers, publications, notes—come from the Letizia Battaglia Archive, a sort of oracular cave where crime news mixes with civil epic, and Sicilian girls become more powerful than a thousand editorials.
Palermo, of course, is the beating heart of this story. But not the picture-postcard Palermo, made up of folklore and stereotypes for export: her Palermo is visceral, ambivalent, wonderfully imperfect. Letizia returns there in the 1970s, when she could have easily continued writing about sex and society for some progressive magazine in Milan. But no: she chooses to stay where it hurts. Where the streets speak a harsh and sincere language. Where every photograph is an act of testimony, and every day a challenge to silence.
Working for L'Ora, the only newspaper at the time that insisted on calling the mafia by its name, Battaglia immortalizes the corpses on the ground, yes, but also the faces that remain: those of mothers, sisters, children, policemen, religious processions, the restless creatures of a psychiatric hospital. It is photography that does not console, but neither does it condemn. It looks. And it asks us to do the same.
The arrest of ferocious Mafia boss Leoluca Bagarella, Palerme 1979. Photograph by Letizia Battaglia ©Archivio Letizia Battaglia
The paradox, which is also the secret of her greatness, is that Letizia Battaglia never wanted to “make art.” And that is precisely why she succeeded. Her images do not seek perfect composition, but truth—which, as Pasolini well knew, is always imperfect, uncomfortable, and sharp.
And if Arles celebrates her today, it is not only because Letizia has become an icon (a word she would probably have detested), but because she has managed to remain uncompromisingly herself. Even when she opened up to the world: Iceland, Russia, the United States. Wherever she went, she brought with her the Palermo gaze, that unique ability to see power and its effects, to read pain without sensationalizing it.
And then there was also the political Letizia, the one who ran for office, founded magazines, published books, dreamed of revolutions. A woman in perpetual disagreement with decorum, and in deep agreement with life. Who did not photograph just to remember, but to challenge.
In an age where everything is storytelling and every shot is filtered to please the algorithm, Letizia Battaglia reminds us that photography can still be a radical gesture. That it can tell us who we are. And that it can do so without soft lighting, without hashtags, without apologizing. Arles, which has made light its profession, today welcomes a woman who has photographed shadows above all else. And she has done so with a full, political, irreducibly feminine gaze. And, something very rare today, a gaze that continues to ask photography to be life. Nothing else. But also nothing less.