Disperazione di un figlio (Desperation of a son), Palermo, 1976. © Courtesy Archivio Letizia Battaglia

The specter of death looms large in Letizia Battaglia’s photographs. Sometimes viscerally, as in her many images showing the victims of mafia violence: hunched over the steering wheel of a car or collapsed on the street, a pool of blood on the ground. In other images, death is on the faces of Battaglia’s subjects: widows and children of the murdered, their wounded expressions revealing as much about the toils of violence as the pictures of corpses. Each is a testament to the delicate border between life and death.

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Battaglia’s photographs are currently on display at London’s Photographers’ Gallery in the fittingly titled “Life, Love and Death in Sicily” exhibition. As a photographer and later photo editor for the local daily newspaper L’Ora, Battaglia captured scenes of everyday life, but it’s her images of the mafia violence that so often characterize Sicily in the public imagination that define this brutal exhibition.

© Observer