Arles 2025 : Letizia Battaglia : Always In Search Of Life

This exhibition exploring the career of Letizia Battaglia features over 100 items from the Archivio Letizia Battaglia, including photographs, books, newspapers and magazines. The archives testify to the diversity of her artistic expression and to her unwavering social engagement.

The young Battaglia started out in the late 1960s in Palermo and Milan, producing magazine features that documented the changing social mores, notably sexual, in Italy at the time. As well as writing the articles, Battaglia also took the accompanying photographs. The most significant period of her photographic career began in the mid-1970s, following her return to Palermo to work for the newspaper L’Ora. Every day for over a decade, she would document the tragic Mafia-related violence that gripped the city, captured in some of the iconic photographs on display here. The exhibition also conveys Battaglia’s skill and determination in portraying her city and region in all their complexity, showing people’s hardships and dignity, their love and joy, the beauty of young faces, the traditions of religious festivals, and the poignant realities of life in a psychiatric hospital.

After receiving the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant for humanistic photography in 1985, Battaglia shifted her focus to other parts of the world, from the Soviet Union and the United States to Turkey and Iceland. But she remained true to her artistic vision, which she described as follows: “Photography becomes—indeed it is—the story of life: I immerse myself in a photograph, which is the world. I become the world, and the world becomes me.” By the mid-1980s, in parallel with her photographic work, Battaglia had become more actively engaged in social causes, later founding magazines and a publishing house. This aspect of her life is also explored in the exhibition, offering a new perspective on her earlier images.

Walter Guadagnini