Letizia Battaglia was born in Palermo in 1935, she is mother of three daughters.
One of the first Italian women working as a photo reporter. Between 1974 and 1991 she is leading the photographic team of the communist daily news ‘L’Ora’ in Palermo and founder of the agency called “Informazione Fotografica”. Her images tell about the bloody years of mafia wars in Sicily. Black and white with strong contrast, he’s archive contains struggling shootings distinguished by the perfection of their composition. She creates silent and solemn images, far from that clamour that often is characterizing the news.
Beyond the death bodies of judges or unnamed victims, through her lenses she continues to show her preferred subjects, as girls or young women as symbol and hope of a possible future. She is not only photographer, she is filmmaker, environmentalist, politically engaged with the group of Leoluca Orlando, deputy at the regional assembly of Sicily and editor with her own ‘Edizioni della Battaglia’. Co-founder of the Sicilian Center of documentation “Giuseppe Impastato” and in 1991 founder of “Mezzocielo”, a magazine with only women working in it.
She is one of the thousand women proposed for the Peace Nobel Prize by Piece Women Across the Globe. The New York Times inserted her – the only Italian – among the 11 most representative women of 2017. She is often invited at conferences and seminars in museums and in Italian as well as in foreigner institutions. In 2017 she realizes her big dream opening in Palermo the international Photography Center, that she leads and where she selects exhibitions and meetings dedicated to historic and contemporary photography. The Uk filmmaker Kim Longinotto in Spring of 2019 dedicated the documentary “Shooting the Mafia” to Letizia. She had the main character in the film “La mafia non è più quella di una volta” directed by Franco Maresco and winning a prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 2019.

Awards

During her career Letizia Battaglia deserved many important prizes.
The first european woman receiving the W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant, in New York, 1985 – a grant for the social photography. In 1986 she won the New York Times Award, in 1999 in San Francisco she received the Mother Jones Photography Lifetime Achievement Award for Documentary Photography, in 2007 in Germany the Dr. Erich Salomon Award from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie, and finally in 2009 the Cornell Capa Infinity Award in New York.

Exhibitions

In the last 40 years Letizia Battaglia was in more than 100 personal exhibitions in Italy, Europe, Asia, North and South America.