Paper short abstract

My talk will focus on Letizia Battaglia and Franco Zecchin, two photographers who constituted a new iconography of the Mafia. Their work allows us to follow the multiple transformations of anti-Mafia photographs: from tools supporting the mobilisation, to pieces of evidence, now turned into art objects.

Paper long abstract

In the seventies, in Italy as in Sicily, the existence of the Mafia was no more than a conjecture. Some judges were trying to prove that the Mafia was a criminal organisation, while activists were denouncing its negative effects by demonstrations and other forms of protestation. One of these - the one that I want to stress - was the anti-Mafia photography. Because the Mafia was a secret society, to capture images of the "Mafiosi" was a declaration of war, fighting with what the force of the Mafia was: its ability to hide and infiltrate society surreptitiously. Because this photography showed scenes of poverty, degradation, social inequality and political corruption, it created a new semantic field of what the Mafia "really" and "objectively" was. My talk will focus on Letizia Battaglia and Franco Zecchin, two photographers who, through their twenty years experience, constituted a new iconography of the Mafia. Their work allows us to follow the multiple transformations of anti-Mafia photographs: from tools supporting the mobilisation, to pieces of evidence, now turned into art objects. I will conclude by drawing a comparison between their adventure and what it means to photograph the Mafia nowadays, using as an example, Mauro d'Agati, a photographer of Neapolitan Camorra.