Battaglia, who took up photography in her late thirties and was entirely self-taught, came to the medium as a tool for emancipation and self-expression. She was dealt a particularly bad hand though, when her return to Palermo in after a three-year stint in Milan coincided with an intensification of hostilities between the upcoming Corleonesi Mafia clan and their city rivals, which soon would culminate in the early s with what came to be known as the Second Mafia War.
For two decades, Battaglia would document the reverberations of such criminal standoffs in a city where violence and killings had become a daily, almost pedestrian occurrence. And she persisted until the twin murders of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in made it impossible to continue.
From there, it alternates snapshots taken directly from crime scenes with photographs documenting everyday life. Here, men turn up dead every day and women are left to weep, while the distinction between Mafiosi, legal authorities, and petty criminals almost evaporates. Looking at a suited man surrounded by four armed escorts, I was shocked to learn that the figure in question was in fact not a gangster, but Magistrate Roberto Scarpinato smoking a cigarette on the rooftop court.
An image of killer Leoluca Bagarellaβthe author of over one hundred and fifty killings, as well as the person who, years later, would order the murder of Falconeβbeside himself while being taken away in handcuffs alternates with the image of a crying baby set against a widening crack in the wall of a poorly-built building.
Likewise, a photograph showing Piersanti Mattarellaβa notable member of the ruling Christian Democrats and President of the Sicilian Region at the time of his death in βas he is taken out of his car so that only his feet are visible is followed by a picture of a Christ carried during a religious procession, also shown in an Andrea Mantegna-esque scorciamento.
