Letizia Battaglia's ethical photography and present-day frequencies with Blue Groove: a brilliant exhibition at CAMERA

©2026 - article by Clara Bruno - all rights reserved CAMERA, Centro Italiano per la Fotografia - Turin, Italy opening of the exhibition dedicated to Letizia Battaglia. Her works 1970-2020

17 October 2026 – 7 February 2027 reading time 4'

In the heart of Turin, at 18 Via delle Rosine, stands the seventeenth-century complex of the Opera Munifica Istruzione, an elegant and historic Baroque building originally created for educational and charitable purposes. Amidst its sweeping vaults and courtyards steeped in history, CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia has made its home here since 2015. Founded on the initiative of both public and private institutions, CAMERA has established itself as one of the country's leading cultural institutions dedicated to the study, promotion, and language of contemporary imagery.

It is against this backdrop that the major retrospective exhibition celebrating the extraordinary work of Letizia Battaglia (1935–2022) opens. The exhibition launches on the evening of 17 October 2026, offering a dense and emotionally charged journey through the human and artistic trajectory of one of the most iconic figures in international photojournalism.

The Activist Lens of a Free Woman

Born in Palermo and coming to photojournalism in the 1970s for the pages of the daily newspaper L’Ora, Letizia Battaglia was a photojournalist driven by a fierce ethical imperative. Her professional biography is closely intertwined with civic life and a deeply held libertarian, feminist, and radically democratic political ethos. She campaigned actively for social redemption, culture, and human rights, whilst also helping to improve living conditions in the historic centre of the Sicilian capital.

Among her most memorable and poignant images are her testimonies of the Anni di Piombo (the so called "Years of Lead", years of terrorism, extremism, violence in Italy) and the brutal Mafia offensive in Sicily: the portrait of Sergio Mattarella supporting the body of his brother Piersanti immediately after his assassination in 1980; the raw yet never voyeuristic crime scenes; Judge Giovanni Falcone; the photographs of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti alongside a prominent Mafia boss, whom he had denied knowing, which were later submitted as evidence in court during Andreotti’s Mafia trial. Alongside these are the intense gazes of young women and girls from Palermo, symbols of resilience in a wounded land. The exhibition also features five historic photographic portraits of exquisite emotional beauty taken by Battaglia of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1972, which vividly capture the sharp, tense, and sorrowful gaze of the great intellectual and leading cultural figure.

In the final years of her career, Battaglia developed the concept of Rielaborazioni ('Re-elaborations'): a cathartic artistic project in which she revisited her iconic, painful black-and-white photographs, overlaying them with images of vibrant naked female figures. This aesthetic gesture of emancipation allowed her to liberate her memory from trauma and restore dignity and hope to her visual narrative.

Throughout her career, the photographer mastered the art of capturing the female nude with absolute purity of vision. Through her lens, the female body is stripped of any salacious morbidity to become a pure celebration of grace. During the 1970s feminist movement, this nudity embodied freedom and a direct challenge to the taboos of the era; in the maturity of her later works, it evolved into a poetic and visceral hymn to the beauty and truth of existence.

Contemporary Dialogues: Music Meets Photography

Alongside the exhibition experience, CAMERA’s museum concept once again demonstrated its ability to engage with contemporary languages, making the opening night particularly evocative. In collaboration with Club Silencio, the exhibition space came alive with the sounds of Blue Groove, a promising tech-house collective from the urban dance scene and promoter of musical events across Italy and European capitals. Founded in 2023 by three students -Giovanni Bonino, Francesco Martino (aka Quavious), and Mattia Sferlazzo (aka Notorius)- the collective organises and hosts parties in clubs, museums, industrial spaces, historic villas, and monumental outdoor locations. Featuring a refined and magnetic musical set curated by DJs Quavious and Notorius, the event at CAMERA helped bridge the gap between the visual arts and modern youth culture, transforming a place of cultural heritage into a stage and creative hub for new generations.

The portrait taken by Letizia Battaglia of 22-year-old Rosaria Costa Schifani, the wife of Vito Schifani, a bodyguard who lost his life alongside Judge Giovanni Falcone in the Capaci Mafia bombing on 23 May 1992. The young woman appears with her eyes closed, her face serene in an expression of absolute grief and, at the same time, monumental dignity. This photograph has become a universal icon of the fight against the Mafia and of civic resistance, capturing the profound mourning and anguish of an entire nation.

 The 1982 photograph depicts a young boy with his face partially covered by a stocking, aiming a toy gun, mimicking the actions of the organised crime hitmen who were bloodying the streets of Palermo in those years. Violence and a climate of terror had permeated the daily lives and imaginations of children in Palermo’s working-class neighbour-hoods. For decades, Letizia Battaglia documented Sicilian life, Mafia crimes, and the socio-economic conditions of women and children, using photojournalism as a powerful tool for social critique and civic engagement.

The photographer Letizia Battaglia. In the background is the 1980 portrait that went around the world, part of her famous series Bambine (‘Young Girls’). Letizia Battaglia often declared her love for photographing young women on the threshold of adolescence—a suspended age when dreams can shatter at any moment against the harsh reality surrounding them. In a Palermo deeply scarred by the Mafia violence of the 1980s, the girl's face and that football, a symbol of a game then considered the domain of boys, became a exceptionally powerful emblem of hope, innocence, and future social redemption.

A young Letizia Battaglia in 1972 in Milan self-portrait

The logo of the tech-house collective Blue Groove, founded in 2023 by three Turin-based students, promoters of clubbing events across Italy and European capitals.