‘Beyond Image: Can a photograph make us truly see?’

“The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearance. The act of filming is an heroic act.”[1]

I have always believed in the power of story. As a child I devoured the stories of others and as a young adult I couldn’t wait to get out into the world and tell my own. In my professional life I’ve alternated between documentary and fiction; in print, on the radio, on stage or through image in photography and film. Whilst the storytelling forms have changed, one underlying constant remains; a belief that the power of story ultimately lies in the truth it reveals. It is those truths that set us on our path to a more harmonious existence, ‘then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’. [2] It is this belief that has driven the direction of my entire life.

At the heart of this belief is the desire to change the reality of things. Part of the transition from child to adult is an expansion in awareness of the world in which we inhabit. In fact it was a news report that effectively ended my childhood. The lead story covering the escalating war in Somalia noted how militia had slashed the stomach of a pregnant woman. At this moment, I understood the truth of things; evil exists in our world. I also understood that the truth could be used as a weapon against it, for now that this story had been beamed out via television sets across the world surely we, the ‘we’ that had the power i.e. the adults in this world, would put a stop to the slaughter?

I have marched to this beat ever since, but reading these words, from the documentary photographer I revere most, stopped me dead;“We have not defeated the enemy, we tried and we are still trying.” [3]After two decades of taking more than 600 000 photographs in her campaign to expose the horrific truth of the mafia’s tyranny, here was Letizia Battaglia stating that she’d failed. The woman regarded as the symbol of courage in the fight for justice and freedom, who risked her life on countless occasions photographing the bodies turned cold by the hand of the mafia, who’s very name means ‘joy’ and ‘battle, by her own admission, defeated.

And if Letizia Battaglia has failed, what hope remains for the rest of us?

Battaglia has, at different times in her life, fulfilled many roles; photographer, publisher, councilwoman, ecological activist, defender of women’s and human rights, mother, but it is her documentary photography of her home town Palermo, Sicily in the 70s, 80s and 90s above all else, that fuels continued discourse about her. Earlier this year, the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool presented for the first time in the UK, a retrospective of her work, entitled ‘Breaking the Code of Silence.’ The title refers to the silent but deadly grasp the mafia had on Sicilians in that period, one of the most tragic periods in contemporary Italian history. “These were eighteen years in which the ferocious Corleonesi mafia clan would claim the lives of governors, senior policemen, entire mafia families and, ultimately, two of Battaglia’s dearest friends: the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.” [4]

Battaglia worked on the front line as a photo-reporter and later as Photography Director of the newspaper L’Ora, Palermo’s left wing daily. She had been present at the scene of every major crime during Palermo’s decent into one of the most bloody periods any European city had known since World War II. During that time she took hundreds of thousands of photographs, many of which documented the activities of the Sicilian Mafia and its assault on civil society. She used her photographs to become one of the first to publicly denounce the activities of the Mafia.

“I took pictures of everything. Suddenly I had an archive of blood. An archive of pain, desperation, of terror, of young people of drugs, young widows of trails and arrests. I was so afraid.” [5]

Despite relentless assassinations, many Sicilians regarded the Mafia with a certain reverence. Their name, ‘Cosa Nostra’ literally translates to ‘this thing of ours’ and even in my own family culture originating in Italy, I find echoes of the pervading myth of that time, that the mafia was somehow the people’s protector. Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather and the films that followed further romanticised the mafia’s role as an omniscient presence; all powerful, all pervading protective hand that fed, never to be bitten.

Letizia’s photographs however, revealed an altogether contrasting reality. “The mafia, were mad, ignorant, cruel and hungry for power. They brought Palermo to the brink of civil war and soon corrupted a good number of politicians, bourgeoisie and aristocracy. They used public money to build awful developments in the suburbs, speculating and investing only for the sake of their own profit. Drugs – heroin in particular – annihilated an entire generation. I witnessed a never-ending cycle of violence and murder.”[6]

Battaglia would be on call morning till late night, sometimes photographing five murder scenes a day, but it is this one photograph, know to be her most famous, that can perhaps reveal whether Letizia failed or not in her mission to make people truly see. Taken in 1982, the photograph features three people murdered by the mafia; Nerina, a young prostitute who had disobeyed the mafia’s code of honour by drug dealing independently from the cartel, and her two friends. The scene affected Battaglia greatly “I entered this little room in Palermo against the will of the police. They did not want me – a photographer and a woman – at the crime scene. When I realised there was a woman among the victims, I started shaking. More than usual, I mean. I was overcome by nausea and could hardly stand.” [7]

 

But does the photographer’s emotion at witnessing the murder scene translate to those who later viewed the image?

What strikes me about this photograph is the domesticity of the setting for such a violent act. It appears to be someone’s living room; a coffee table at the centre with recently lit cigarettes in the ash trays, a settee to the left of frame, an armchair to the right, with the door back and centre. If this were a stage play setting, I’d expect the next beat of the scene to be for someone to open the door, shake the ‘sleeping’ man on the settee and thus the family drama would begin.

Then I notice the blood splatter on the wall. This aside, there is very little gore contained within the frame. The lack of blood, the body positions of ‘slumber’ on the settee and the armchair, trick the eye into assuming that this is a mundane scene, even the framing is a safe standard, central mid height wide shot. The photograph does not scream the horrors of which it contains. Herein lies its power.

Roland Barthes discusses this contrast in his book ‘Camera Lucida’ “A photograph made me pause. I understood at once that its existence (its adventure) derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong in the same world: the soldiers and the nuns.” [8] And so it is in Battaglia’s photograph, the dead bodies do not belong in the living room.

Barthes goes on to say that whilst many photographs interest him from an intellectual viewpoint, what he called the studium; as political testimony, historical scenes or culturally engaging faces, gestures, settings, a truly great photograph must contains something else. “The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seeks it out, it is an element that rises in the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow and pieces me., the punctum.“ [9] The punctum in Battaglia’s photograph is highlighted by the fact it is the only face we see in the image; the face of Nerina. This tells the onlooker one irrefutable truth; the mafia kills women.

By the time this picture had been published, the people of Sicily had gotten used to Battaglia’s images of dead men slain in the streets in pools of blood or hunched over in their cars with spattered and smashed windscreens. Dismissed by the public as mobsters the mafia were perversely seen to be doing some kind of service, ‘cleaning up’ their streets. Many people viewed her images in the daily newspaper, but they had stopped seeing them. “On the wealth of too many images of suffering are we ourselves suffering from ‘compassion fatigue’ as author William Shawcross announced. Our sensitivities diminished by the sheer amount of exposure, the consequent numbing effect and the photographers desire to create impact have resulted in a form of violence tourism.” [10]If this is true, then what is the point of showing people the horrors of war if they are no longer moved to action against it?

Photography has been viewed as many contrasting things by many people; too pedestrian to be an art (Baudelaire) too mechanical to be true (Rodin) as “essentially an act of non-intervention” by Susan Songtag. Yet Sontag wrote after seeing photographs of Bergen Belen and Dachau “nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.”

In her investigations ‘Regarding The Pain Of Others’ Sontag discusses Virginia Woolf’s ‘Three Guineas’, her published response in 1938 to a question from an eminent London laywer ‘How in your opinion are we to prevent war?’ Woolf begins by stating truthful dialogue between them may not be possible for although they both belong to the educated class, he is a man and she a woman, ‘men make war. Men (most men) like War, since for men there is ‘some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting’ that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy?.” [11]

She then suggests they view some documentary photographs of war, ‘let’s see whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things’. She continues ‘ you Sir call them ‘horror and disgust’ we also call them horror and disgust. War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; a war must be stopped at whatever cost. We echo your words.” Sontag notes that ‘Woolf professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will’ then questions the validity of the statement. “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”[12]

Sontag here is highlighting the disconnect between what one person would regard as suffering, compared to another. Whilst there are no doubt constraints of culture, education and religious dispositions, a successful documentary photographer will cut through those filters and get to the heart of the matter, emoting the audience no matter who they may be. “The documentary photograph is equally one of the most intimate forms of photographic practise. It assumes a bond between reader and subject, buoyed up by and assumed mandate not just to record, but to expose: the ‘camera with a conscience.”[13]

The punctum of Battaglia’s image of the murdered Nerina pierced the peoples’ apathy and woke them up with up because it flew it the face of everything they thought they knew about the mafia. Their ‘truth’ that the mafia is moral, that it protects, was shattered with this one image of a murdered woman’s face. “I found myself thinking about her. In that small room, her still body was at everybody’s mercy, more objectified than ever. My contact with her lasted only a few moments and was filtered through the lens of a cheap camera. But I saw her alone, lost in an eternity of silence. In that short time, I started to love her.” [14]The young woman’s objectification is highlighted by the photograph above her lifeless body of the topless model, posing for the camera.

Whilst Battaglia was there to ‘record the moment’ as is the definition of documentary photography; document means evidence, traced to medieval word documentum, meaning official paper, a truthful account backed by law, clearly some other element is at work in her photographs. Her. “Photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject.” [15]

For Battaglia, the war against the mafia was intensely personal. “It was my home, my people who were threatened. The camera offered me the possibility of fighting. Before that I didn’t have the tools to change the world. With my camera I was there, in the battle.” [16]

It is this passion that give her photographs such weight to sway public opinion and mark the beginnings of a sea change in Italy. Within two years of the publication of Battaglia’s photograph of the murdered woman, the infamous Maxi trial started, during which over four hundred Mafiosi were arrested and imprisoned. Battaglia’s long term collaborator and photographer, Franco Zecchin notes “certainly the mafia, which had always been so absolutely sure of its own power did not expect that a bunch of photographs could have such a powerful effect. And the people of Palermo had their doubts, they had been living so long in a state of terror.[17]

But those in corrupt positions were determined to hold on to their power and the violence escalated. In 1992, coinciding with the end of the cold war, the mafia car bombed the leading prosecutors against them, provoking massive street protests. The following year the police arrested Giulio Andreotti, who had been prime minister of Italy seven times.

Andreotti denied ever having met Nino Salvo, Sicilian businessman and go between the mafia and the politicians but a photograph taken by Battaglia at a party conference proved otherwise. Fifteen years later, it was the only hard evidence directly linking Andreotti to a mafia member.

Until then, mafia killings had been viewed as a ‘local problem’ one gang member killing another but Battaglia’s photographs revealed mafia killings were directly affecting voting, at stake was the democratic life of Sicily and Italy as a whole. “She understood photography’s power to reveal and reinforce undeniable truths, to move public opinion, to be both evidence and catalyst”comments Melissa Harris, Senior Editor at Aperture. [18]

So when Battaglia herself claims ‘we have not defeated the enemy,’ I do not view this statement as admission of failure but rather an expression of her continued commitment to use her photography as a weapon against injustice. Inside the battle itself, it is difficult for Battaglia to look from the outside in and understand what others do, that her photographs truly made people see.

Her statement reminds me in sentiment of another, altogether more famous image maker and storyteller, George Clooney, when during an interview on ‘Inside the Actor’s Studio he lamented, ‘telling the world the truth doesn’t necessarily change anything.’ Yet Clooney continues to pay $3m each year to fund a satellite, an eye in the sky, recording the actions of war lords in Sudan. So too Battaglia continues to take her photographs.

“The window is also a mirror” Szarkowski notes. Nothing truer can be said of Battaglia’s photographs, for she not only showed us the real violence of the mafia but also revealed what we had become in letting them commit these acts with such immunity.

By Susan Luciani

[1]Wenders, W – 1991 – The logic of Images – Faber and Faber

[2]2011 – John: 8:32 New Testament – The Holy Bible, King James Version – Harper Collins

[3]Stille, A – 1999 – Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom Photographs of Sicily – Aperture

[4]Jinks, P – 2012 – The Observer, London

[5]Stille, A – 1999 – Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom Photographs of Sicily – Aperture

[6]www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/20

[7]Stille, A – 1999 – Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom Photographs of Sicily – Aperture

[8]Barthes, R – 1993 –   Camera Lucida – Vintage Classics (new Edition)

[9]Barthes, R – 1993 –   Camera Lucida – Vintage Classics (new Edition)

[10]Ritchin, F – 2009 – After Photography – W.W Norton & Company

[11]Woolf, V – 1938 – Three Guineas – Create Space Independent Publishing (2013)

[12]Sontag, S – 2003 – Regarding the Pain of Others – Penguin – London

[13]Clarke, G – 1997 – The Photograph – Oxford University press

[14]www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/20

[15]Berger, J – 1972 – Ways of Seeing – Penguin Modern Classics

[16]Stille, A – 1999 – Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom Photographs of Sicily – Aperture

[17]Stille, A – 1999 – Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom Photographs of Sicily – Aperture

[18]Stille, A – 1999 – Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom Photographs of Sicily – Aperture