Letizia Battaglia: Photography As a Life Choice
May 25 - Oct 2 2022
Slovenska 9
"I have this long life behind me. I dreamed, I believed I was fighting for the right cause."
- Letizia Battaglia
Letizia Battaglia was interested in everything that surrounded her, but also in everything that aroused her curiosity from afar. Her best-known works are the images that recount with activist passion the bloody years of the Sicilian Mafia wars. Despite this, she felt that the title "Mafia photographer" did not suit her.
With her black-and-white images, she preferred to present herself as a witness to what was happening in her hometown, which she documented regularly, practically to the end. Her favourite subjects were children and young women, as an expression of a possible future.
The exhibition Photography as a Life Choice, curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti, presents 300 photographs that reveal the social and political context in which they were shot, published, exhibited, experienced, and interpreted. The selection of photos was undertaken together with the Letizia Battaglia archive.
On show there are many images previously unseen by the public, the result of lengthy research, which have been arranged according to such themes as portraits of photographers, women, Sicilians, animals, such cities as Palermo, Milan, Paris and then politics, life, death, love and horizons.
The exhibition brings together images which helps to convey the strongly radicalised ideas that characterise the whole work of Letizia Battaglia. Her way of photographing people, places, and events, for example, never gets bogged down in clichés, but makes a continuous social criticism by questioning the visual assumptions of contemporary culture.
- text courtesy of Galerija Jakopič