Letizia Battaglia… Leading Photographer Who Documented Mafia Dies at 87

Letizia Battaglia, an Italian photographer who depicted the Mafia world in her works, passed away at the age of 87.

Battaglia died in the Sicilian capital Palermo late on Wednesday, according to reports.

She portrayed the brutal Mafia wars of the 1980s and 1990s, highlighting political assassinations and dead bodies in pools of blood on sidewalks or abandoned on the side of a rural road.

The photographer called her archive, which had more than half a million pictures, “an archive of blood”.

“I did what I could to shake consciences by showing not only violent deaths but also the poverty caused by the Mafia,” Battaglia once said.

“She documented the atrocities of the Mafia long before it was popular or safe to do so,” Alexander Stille, author of “Excellent Cadavers,” a landmark book about the Mafia, wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1999.

“Palermo loses an extraordinary woman, a reference point,” said Leoluca Orlando, the Sicilian capital’s current mayor. “Letizia Battaglia was an internationally recognised symbol, a flag bearer on the path of liberation of the city of Palermo from governance by the Mafia.”