Letizia Battaglia's vintage shots on display in Rome

The Cembalo Gallery in Rome presents from February 11 to April 9, 2022 the exhibition Letizia Battaglia. Vintage Prints, curated by Alberto Damian and Matteo Sollima.

The exhibition shows some of the Sicilian photographer’s best-known shots, sometimes flanked by a second glimpse of the same situation, often printed in a darkroom as a single copy: forty small-format prints chosen by Letizia Battaglia from her own archive, together with the curators. The evocative power lies in what is concealed in each of the small works on display: the history of the individual sheet of paper: the back side of each print adds a story of its own, suggested by the various stamps of the author and the agencies that distributed her work to newspapers and periodicals, by annotations and printing directions, as well as by the captions written on the spot.

Made between the 1970s and early 1990s, most of the photographs bear witness to the complex reality of life in Palermo at the time, from Mafia murders to the plight of children, from life in the slums to the parties of the aristocracy. To this main core are added some images taken abroad, for example in 1986 in New York, where Letizia Battaglia had gone to collect the New York Times Award and where the year before she had received the W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant, the first European woman to receive this award, or in Arkhangelsk, in the Soviet Union, with a now highly topical portrait of a group of nurses with their faces covered by masks, or finally in 1987 in the psychiatric ward of a women’s prison in Madrid.

“With the camera I conquered myself, my independence,” the photographer comments about the early years when she took photographs to accompany the articles she wrote, in Milan. On the times of the murders in Palermo, the period of her greatest activity, she recalled, “I lived those years with much pain and much shame because things happened that were humanly impossible to accept.”

For more info: http://www.galleriadelcembalo.it

Hours: Wednesday through Friday from 3:30 to 7 p.m.; Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Or by appointment.

Free admission.

Letizia Battaglia's vintage shots on display in Rome

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