The blood wasn't yet dry when she was there with the camera.

In the darkroom, Letizia Battaglia had listened to the police radio and then, her partner Franco Zecchin steering the Vespa, swung into the back seat.

She reached the scene of the crime even before the carabinieri and witnessed atrocities, as they were the order of the day in Palermo at the time: politicians, judges and public prosecutors, businessmen and trade unionists were killed by the Cosa Nostra on the street, massacred in their cars, in front of their eyes women and children shot.

Andreas Rossman

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

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Like Piersanti Mattarella, then President of the Region of Sicily (and brother of the current President), who was shot dead in front of his house in Via Libertà on January 6, 1980, a quiet, deserted Sunday.

Those were the city's "leaden years".

The photographer was an eyewitness and prosecutor of the "respectable society".

She has portrayed the crimes of the mafia, victims and perpetrators, those who were executed and those left behind, those who mourned and those who offered consolation, the widows, mothers and children, arrested bosses and prosecutors with their bodyguards: images of silent, often shocked drama, full of blood and tears, despair and Fright.

Pictures full of blood and tears

Letizia Battaglia was not interested in art, but in enlightenment.

As a photojournalist, she worked for the small, left-wing newspaper "L'Ora" and on behalf of a public that preferred to look the other way and come to terms with the brutal reality.

Their recordings were pictorial outcry against the omertà that Sicilian society had internalized: calls to break the deadly silence.

Often she "just pointed it out", more than six hundred thousand photos were taken.

The best of them have spiked public awareness and been recognized worldwide for their image composition and disturbing immediacy, reportage photography in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, all in black and white – “out of respect for the victims”.

Her life has not been linear: born in Palermo in 1935, married at sixteen, three daughters, divorced in her mid-thirties and “escape” to Milan, where she worked as a journalist for three years before returning to Sicily with Franco Zecchin.

“I didn't want to be a photographer, it was the task I was given.

When I look at the pictures, the nausea and disgust from when I took them come back to me.

They haunt me in my dreams.

I'm not a war correspondent, although we were fighting a civil war here," she told the newspaper in 2007.

In the early 1990s, Letizia Battaglia stopped photographing the mafia, and not just because L'Ora was discontinued.

The assassination attempt on Giovanni Falcone, who was blown up with his escort on the Autobahn in 1992, went beyond the limits of representation.

Leoluca Orlando, who first became mayor of Palermo in 1985, made her head of department for "Urban Quality of Life" in 1987, who during her three-year tenure had pedestrian zones and a park with palm trees laid out on the Foro Italico, which brought the city closer to the sea.

"Your suggestions were always on the edge of legality and aimed at helping those on the fringes of society," said Orlando in a first tribute to the companion: "Letizia was an extraordinary person who made visible what was invisible."

Letizia Battaglia has never let go of her hometown, where she founded a "Center for International Photography" in 2017: she died in Palermo on Wednesday at the age of 87.