| Anthology Contributor(s): Battaglia, Letizia (Author) |
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ISBN: 8898565186 ISBN-13: 9788898565184 Publisher: Drago OUR PRICE: $81.00 Product Type: Hardcover Published: September 2016 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Photography | Individual Photographers - Monographs - Photography | Photojournalism - Photography | Subjects & Themes - Street Photography |
| Physical Information: 1.5" H x 9.8" W x 13.1" (6.30 lbs) 360 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Italy |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This is an Anthology that is all about getting close enough. As the quotation at the start of the book says, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. Like the people you are shooting, and let me know it." This is the opening line of Anthology, a book published by Drago and curated by Paolo Falcone. And this is a book that allows you to get close enough. A rich tapestry of one of the most significant photographers of the twentieth century and it is the multidisciplinary nature of Battaglia, as a photographer, that has created an immeasurable body of work. The Anthology functions as a documentation of Sicily's "Lead Years", the "Anni di Piombo", and it is this criminality that Battaglia has always refused to dress up in any other colour than black and white. For the Anthology is a collection of photography, entirely in monochrome. And this is the means through which Battaglia manages to pick both life and death out of her city. By reducing the noise of her city, the images in Anthology are brought to life. They are revved up. It's a culture of decadence and it's a culture of death. From the very first pages of the book it becomes clear that Anthology is a mixture of blood, sweat and tears . The book does not start with blood, but with images of love and labour: a line of workers stand, raising sickles above their heads, a marriage seems furtive and hurried as a bride gets into a car, a couple kiss on a beach. And then comes the blood. And this is blood, which in real time, is mingled with the smell of brioches from the Patisserie, the smell of hot sun on the tarmac, the sound of the honking cars. And yet in Anthology, Battaglia reduces this cacophony to the fact that making a photograph a shot of time outside of all other surrounding stimuli, means you capture the world. You capture the anthological feel of a moment that would otherwise be tarnished by too much noise. And it is by stripping down every image to the bare minimum that Battaglia ensures that death is not tarnished by life. And equally that life is not tarnished by other forms of life and by other moments in such a chaotic city. Especially in a city like Palermo, where the shootings were never a single event, but a myriad round of gunfire shots, cheap shots of the midnight grappa. And it is this fact that Anthology shows perfectly. Anthology tells a story in black and white. No addition of colour could have made these moments of death, which took place in Battaglia's city, quite so anthological. Nor would it make it quite so much about the citizens and the lives playing themselves out in Palermo. If Battaglia is a war journalist, then she is also a birth journalist and a capturer of all the stages of life that take place in between. In one of the penultimate images of the collection, a woman is giving birth. The ultimate and final image, a piece of graffiti, is something of a request. Prego graffitied a wall of a street in Palermo five times. A prayer, a thanks, a demand for forgiveness. The Anthology is a story of labour. The labour it takes to love a city. The labour it takes to fight brutality; the labour it takes to leave. It is a collection curated by Paolo Falcone and covers Letizia Battaglia's photographic work from 1971-2016. There is a dedication by Paolo Falcone at the end of the book. The book offers something profound, not only for those with an interest in Sicilian history, the brutality of the Corleone mafia clan or the Lead Years, it exposes the wave of violence that plagued not just the city of Palermo, but two decades of fighting between the political left and right extremes in Italy. It is also an Anthology of profound human experience, joy and suffering. And important to all. |
Contributor Bio(s): Battaglia, Letizia: - Letizia Battaglia (born 5 March 1935) is an Italian photographer and photojournalist. Although her photos document a wide spectrum of Sicilian life, she is best known for her work on the Mafia. She was born in Palermo, Sicily. Married at 16, she took up photojournalism after her divorce in 1971, while raising three daughters. She picked up a camera when she found that she could better sell her articles if they were accompanied by photographs and slowly discovered a burning passion for photography. In 1974, after a period in Milan during which she met her long-time partner Franco Zecchin, she returned to Sicily to work for the left-wing L'Ora newspaper in Palermo until it was forced to close in 1992.[1] Battaglia took some 600,000 images as she covered the territory for the paper. Over the years she documented the ferocious internal war of the Mafia, and its assault on civil society. Battaglia sometimes found herself at the scene of four or five different murders in a single day. Battaglia and Zecchin produced many of the iconic images that have come to represent Sicily and the Mafia throughout the world. She photographed the dead so often that she was like a roving morgue. "Suddenly," she once said, "I had an archive of blood." Battaglia also became involved in women's and environmental issues. For several years she stopped taking pictures and officially entered the world of politics. From 1985 to 1991 she held a seat on the Palermo city council for the Green Party, from 1991 to 1996 she was a Deputy at the Sicilian Regional Assembly for The Network. She was instrumental in saving and reviving the historic center of Palermo. For a time she ran a publishing house, Edizioni della Battaglia, and co-founded a monthly journal for women, Mezzocielo. She is deeply involved in working for the rights of women and, most recently, prisoners. In 1993, when prosecutors in Palermo indicted Giulio Andreotti, who had been prime minister of Italy seven times, the police searched Battaglia's archives and found two 1979 photographs of Andreotti with an important Mafioso, Nino Salvo, he had denied knowing. Aside from the accounts of turncoats, these pictures were the only physical evidence of this powerful politician's connections to the Sicilian Mafia. Battaglia herself had forgotten having taken the photograph. Its potential significance was apparent only 15 years after it was taken. In 1985 she received the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. In 1999 she received the Photography Lifetime Achievement of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography. In 2007 she received the Erich Salomon-Preis, a 'lifetime achievement' award of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh) and the most prestigious prize in Germany. In 2009, she was given the Cornell Capa Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography. In 2005, she appeared in the documentary Excellent Cadavers based on the 1995 book by Alexander Stille. Battaglia plays the role of survivor and passionate eyewitness. Battaglia has a cameo appearance in the 2008 Wim Wenders film Palermo Shooting as a photographer. |