contessanally: Venice: Casa dei Tre Oci – Letizia Battaglia

“I have experienced photography as a document, as an interpretation, and as many other things [...]. I have experienced it as salvation and as truth.”

Letizia Battaglia

Casa dei Tre Oci

Letizia Battaglia - Photography as a Life Choice

At the Casa dei Tre Oci, until August 18, the anthological exhibition of the works of Letizia Battaglia (Palermo 1935), one of the most significant protagonists of Italian photography, which ranges over her entire career.

The show, curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti, organized by Civita Tre Venezie, promoted by the Fondazione di Venezia, presents 300 photographs, many of which have never been exhibited before, and which reveal the social and political context in which they were shot.

http://treoci.org/index.php/en/

http://www.civitatrevenezie.it/it-it/

http://www.fondazionedivenezia.org/

Battaglia is known above all for having recorded with her photos what the mafia has represented for her city, from murders to mourning, from political intrigues to the struggle represented by Falcone and Borselino, during her career she has also recounted the life of the poor and public uprisings, always with her city as the center of her observations of reality, as well as its urban landscape.

Letizia Battaglia

Vicino la Chiesa di Santa Chiara - Il gioco dei killer – 1982 - Palermo

Letizia Battaglia
Il segretario del PCI Enrico Berlinguer pronuncia il suo discorso nel corso del comizio del PCI in Piazza Politeama - 1983 - Palermo

The exhibition itinerary focuses on those arguments that have been at the heart of the most characteristic expressive aspects of Letizia Battaglia and that have led her to make a deep and continuous social criticism while avoiding clichés and questioning the visual premises of contemporary culture. The portraits of women, men, animals, and children are only some of the chapters that make up the show; added to these are photos of cities such as Palermo, and then those devoted to politics, life, death, love, as well as two films that inquire into her human and artistic activities.

“What the exhibition project aims at showing are ‘forms of attention’: something that comes about even before the photos, because Letizia Battaglia questions herself about everything that her eyes fall on, perhaps a murder or a child, a view or a gathering, a person or the sky. Looking has been her main activity and has ‘materialized’ in extraordinary images.”
Francesca Alfano Miglietti
curator
Press Conference

Giovanni Dell’Olivo and curator Francesca Alfano Miglietti

Letizia Battaglia and Denis Curti

Nerina - 2018

“I didn’t feel like photographing men, the politicians. They came out poorly, out of focus, ugly, I needed to take pictures of women because I was taking pictures of myself. Through photography I tried to express myself.”
Letizia Battaglia

Mistretta - 1983 - La Ricamatrice - 1987 Montemaggiore Belsito

Nerina -1982

Maria Chiara Di Trapani
Archive researcher

Maria Chiara - 2008

Lunedi di Pasquetta - 1974 - Piano Battaglia

La Bambina con il Pallone – 1980 – quartiere La Calla - Palermo

“I’m the one who seeks out little girls, with great emotion: whenever I meet a girl with a scowl on her face, on the threshold of adolescence, thin with glasses and straight hair, that’s me. And when I photograph her it’s as if one little girl were meeting another.”

Vicino la Chiesa di Casa Professa – 1991 - Palermo

Letizia Battaglia with curator Francesca Alfano Miglietti

“I think a photograph even withholds the kisses you gave and the kisses you are given. When you take pictures there’s the life you have lived, everything is inside a photograph when it is successful.”

Il Tempio di Segesta - 1986

“Pasolini was a shining light, a legend, I went looking for him with my camera. I wasn’t as yet and didn’t know I would become a photographer, but I took pictures. He was what I wanted: a sincere, clean, dramatic and brave life.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini al Circolo Turati, durante il dibattito "Libertà d'espressione tra repressione e pornografia", dedicato alle censura e alla vicende processuali del film “I Racconti di Canterbury" - 1972

“I feel moved and excited when I walk down the alleyways of Palermo… the statue of a Madonna, an image of Christ, the scents, a crooked window...”

Misteri Pasquali - 1985 – Gangi – Venerdi Santo – 1984 - Marsala Misteri Pasquali – 1985

Mara – 1986 - Arrchianata dei Devoti al Santuario di Santa Rosilia – 1990 – Monte Pellegrino – Roberto Scarpinato Pubblico Ministero al processo contro l’ex primo ministro Giulio Andreotti – 1998 - Palermo