Letizia Battaglia - Friuli Venezia Giulia Fotografia 2017 Awards for a National photographer

Letizia Battaglia (Palermo, March 5, 1935) began her carrier in 1969 as she was collaborating with the newspaper L’ora. In 1970 she moved to Milano where she worked for some other newspapers. In 1974 she turned back to Parlermo and she founded with Franco Zecchin the agency “Informazione fotografica” attended by Josef Koudelka and Ferdinando Scianna. In 1974 she documented the beginning of the “lead years” in Parlermo by photographing the mafia criminal acts to communicate the atrocity of that period. She photographed Giulio Andreotti in the Zagarella Hotel with mafiosi Salvo. Those pictures were used for the process. She became famous all around the world. But Letizia Battaglia is not only “the mafia photographer”. Her photos, often in pure black and white, want to tell Palermo in its misery and in its beauty, its mafia deaths, its traditions, the children and women glimpses, the districts, the streets, the folk festivities, the mourning, the daily life, the faces of power in a contradictory city. During the Eighties she created in Palermo the “If laboratory” where have grown some photographers as her daughter Shobba, Mike Palazzotto and Salvo Fundarotto.

She was the first european woman to receive in 1985, ex aequo with American Donna Ferrato, the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. In 1999 she received the Photography Lifetime Achievement of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography. She had exhibitions in Italy, in the East European countries, in France, Great Britain, USA, Brazil, Switzerland, Canada. Her social Commitment and her passion for freedom and justice are described in the book Passione, Giustizia e Libertà edited by Motta. From 2000 to 2003 she created and directed the magazine for women Mezzocielo. In spite of her Sicilian roots, she moved to Paris in 2003 because she was unhappy with the change of social environment and with the sense of marginalization of her city but she came back in 2005. In 2008 she has a cameo appearance in the Wim Wenders film “Palermo Shooting” as a photographer.