EditShooting the Mafia (2019)

When Mafia is involved, most of us feel some mixture of fear and curiosity. Italian photojournalist Letizia Battaglia started exposing Cosa Nostra at age 40. She was the first female photographer, employed by an Italian newspaper back in the 1970s to do that. Despite of regularly receiving death threats because of her work, the brave woman, born and raised in Palermo, brings to the public close-ups of the everyday life of people living with constant fear. Showing an original perspective to Sicilian Mafia, Battaglia confesses that her pictures have stamped so much pain, brutality and death that she sometimes want to put them all on fire. It was a good thing she didn’t demolish her archives, because today, through Battaglia’s arresting black-and-white photographs, we become witnesses of the brutal truth about Italian Mafia without the artificial romantic veil.