LETIZIA BATTAGLIA: SHOOTING THE MAFIA

At one point in this film* the photographer Letizia Battaglia** talks about holding an impromptu exhibition of her photographs on the streets of Corleone, a Sicilian mafia stronghold.  You think that maybe this is that film convention – the pivotal moment, an act which changes the tide of events. The interviewer asks what it was like to do such a thing, to take the war into the enemy’s camp, so to speak.  “It was terrifying” says Letizia. and you see footage of the town’s residents looking at the horrifying images of violence and murder and walking silently away.  Clearly, nothing is changing.

Uncredited publicity shot

From the mid-1970s on Battaglia photographed the results of Mafia violence in Palermo and beyond when it did seem as though the Italian state was losing the fight against organised crime.  She wanted to show that this was not simply a war exclusively between so-called mafia men of honour but a campaign which used fear and violence to silence a population.  The photographs themselves are both shocking and mesmerising, showing corpse after corpse and murder after murder.  The photographer says that at times she was shaking so much she had trouble even remembering basics like exposure and focus.  Still some reviewers insist on talking about the aesthetics of the images, of her sense of composition and so on – which just seems like a way of avoiding the reality of the photograph.

One of the main themes that emerges from the film is the sustained courage that it must take to do this work over such a long period in the face of harassment and death threats and an all-pervasive fear.  Yet she has captured also other sides of Sicilian society in very beautiful photographs.  This mercurial quality comes out in the film: she talks deeply and passionately about her work and then suddenly dismisses it and suggests it achieved nothing.

I came out of the film feeling a bit shaken myself.  Partly it is the sheer power of her personality: being in her company must be a bit like being on a bicycle in a hurricane.  Partly also it was the nature of the photographs. And then it was the archive footage of a society on the brink of chaos.  Not unlike the photos of Gordon Parks that I reviewed in a December 2017 blogpost.  you think that these images have done their job and that they are now history.  Then suddenly that same chaos in a different guise reappears on the horizon.  Then photos like these are back in the fray.  In that sense, this is a very timely film.  

The focus of the film, though, is the photographer. She provides the narrative which is filled out by colleagues and lovers plus old newsreel and documentary clips. The visuals, including her own photography, tend to be ancillary. It’s that imbalance again between the word and the image. Many of the photographs are unexplained shots of male corpses: we have no real idea who the victims are. Personally I would like to have heard a little less of the Letizia herself, compelling presence though she is, and seen a little more of the photography with details of how it was used in the anti-mafia campaign.

*  Shooting the Mafia (2019) is a documentary directed by Kim Longinotto and produced by Niamh Fagan

** LB appears not to have a website - that I can find anyway, though any search engine will pull up plenty of material about her. 

"TRACKING EDITH": THE LIFE OF EDITH TUDOR HART

What Exactly Was She?

Copyright: Peter Suschitzky, Julia Donat & Misha Donat

The film “Tracking Edith” currently on distribution in the UK tells the interesting story of Edith Tudor-Hart (nee Suschitsky) photographer and Soviet agent.  Despite the 90 minutes or so that it devotes to her she remains a shadowy figure.  She was born in Vienna, studied photography at the Bauhaus, and married an Englishman, Alexander Tudor-Hart with whom she had one son before the marriage came to an end.  She seems to have been recruited to the Soviet cause by Arnold Deutsch an Austrian communist who was killed during the war.  Her interest for students of the cold war is that she is said to have been the person who recruited Kim Philby. (The National Archives summary of the security files on her conclude that “it was almost certainly she who first talent spotted Philby”.)  This came to light when MI5 documents were declassified a few years ago – though those shown in the film do not seem to prove her role beyond doubt and other sources seem to suggest that it was in fact Philby’s wife Litzi Friedmann who proposed him.

For photohistorians she is perhaps best known for her photographs of children receiving ultraviolet light treatment for rickets.  The National Galleries of Scotland had a major exhibition of her work in 2013 which proposed her as “one of the most significant documentary photographers working in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s.”  I would have thought that that was putting it a bit high.  She is not mentioned in either of the two standard works on my shelves, The Oxford Companion To The Photograph nor in A New History Of Photography (ed. Michel Frizot),  although her brother Wolfgang Suschitsky is twice.  It seems that her left-wing sympathies, and suspicion about her connections to the Soviet security services, led MI5 to lean heavily on Fleet Street not to use her work. Perhaps that is more the reason for her absence from standard works on photographic history: MI5 made sure she didn’t get the breaks.  (Good job that things like that can’t happen now, eh?)

The film was interesting though jumbled, I thought, and needed a stronger editor.  She never really emerges distinctly and seems to have been a delphic figure: she is described by contemporaries as being both ‘melancholic’ and ‘attractive and vivacious’.  Perhaps that made her a good agent. From memory, the film makes no direct quotation from any of letters she may have written or from any conversations with her bar one with her brother which seems to have been recorded somehow by MI5.  

As a result of the film and the book of her life that preceded it (both the work of her great nephew Peter Stephan Jungk) and a study of her photography “Edith Tudor Hart: In The Shadow Of Tyranny” by Duncan Forbes she may be emerging from the penumbra into which she had retreated historically.  It will be interesting to see what happens next.  What we have here after all is a fascinating psychological split.   A spy is above all an actor in events and a putative manipulator of them.  Photographers are quite different: they are observers or reporters of events from which they must maintain a distance.  Could she have been both?

From what I have seen of them, her photos seem accomplished and powerful and quite clearly focused on the poverty and inequality of the day.  Yet this work seems to play second fiddle to her role at the centre of the scandal that continues to mesmerise the British establishment to this day.  Perhaps that is because it is easier in the current political climate for the national psyche to cast a female left-wing foreigner in the role of spy and traitor than in that of a committed reporter of the social issues that continue to bedevil us .