Photographing Death to Save Photojournalism: Mafia Homicides in Letizia Battaglia’s ‘Archive of Blood’

Letizia Battaglia is an internationally renowned Sicilian photographer who acquired popularity in the 1980s for her reportage on Palermo’s mafia homicides of criminals, judges, police officers and journalists. Battaglia’s photos have shocked the audience with their crude representation of death. Theoretically, the chapter draws on remediation and the ability of the media to draw on each other to renew their language; and on Barthes’s link between photography and death and the distinction between studium and punctum. Methodologically, the chapter applies social semiotic analysis to Battaglia’s photos of mafia homicides. The results link to the social context. In those years, in fact, photojournalism was in crisis because of television, which could rely on more appealing moving images. However, television had to ‘clean’ its representations of corpses and eliminate the most shocking images, being TV destined for families and children. To survive, photojournalism had two choices: to change either the eye which looks at reality (William Klein’s street photography) or the subject of the photos, as Battaglia did. She remediated TV’s language, but showed what television could not represent: death. In leaving Barthes’s studium and its conventionality to television, in her photos she concentrated on the punctum, involving the viewer emotionally.