Rencontres d'Arles 2025: "I have always sought life," Letizia Battaglia's Sicily

Letizia Battaglia trembled before 10-year-old girls and photographed the bloody crimes of the mafia. One hundred photographs of the great Sicilian photojournalist, who died in 2022, are displayed in the chapel of Saint-Martin du Méjan in a poignant exhibition that retraces her career. A photographer at forty, director of the photo service of Ora , a left-wing newspaper that opposed the mafia, she documented the violence that ran through Sicilian society in the 1970s (4 murders per day), aware that she was putting her life in danger.

But Letizia Battaglia is not only the photographer of bloody black and white murders, the first European woman to receive the W. Eugene Smith Prize in 1985. Her moving photographs of misery - where babies are nibbled by rats - her modest erotic photos, illustrating the changes in morals in Italy, and her photos of patients at the psychiatric hospital in Palermo, bear witness to her commitment and her immense sensitivity.