Another powerfully moving exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery. This time it was Letizia Battaglia, who put herself in the firing line of the Sicilian mafia again and again, to the point where she was issued with thinly veiled death threats because of her graphic documentation of the street violence in and around Palermo. The risks she took to record this violent period in history are astonishing, using a Pentax K1000 and wide angle lens she had to get very close to her subjects, but this she insisted was the only way to capture the human suffering.
Her eye for composition and juxtaposition work together again and again and I love the grainy quality of the work, which nods to the grimy streets and dingy corners. Photography once again proves that it is the premier medium for portraying terror, fear and the full extent of human suffering.
