Shooting gallery

If you were a press photographer working in Palermo in the 1970s and 1980s, then it was an inevitability that you'd end up covering a lot of Mafia assassinations. It's fair to say that Letizia Battaglia's subject found her rather than vice versa. It's also fair to say that Life, Love And Death In Sicily, the retrospective of her work currently on display at the Photographers' Gallery, features more death than life or love.

On the one hand, Battaglia's pictures capture humanity's ugliness. She certainly couldn't be accused of glamorising the Mafia lifestyle, showing none of the prestige that can come with power and authority.

But on the other, the images are frequently beautiful, even in their depictions of blood pooling behind heads and the anguished faces of relatives and mourners. In one, a victim lies behind a parked car, looking like he's sleeping peacefully; in another, artfully displayed nearby, a group of women cluster around and watch over a dead Christ.

Children are a recurrent presence, perhaps most notably in 'The Little Girl And The Darkness', in which the titular girl is bathed in light while adults skulk barely visible in the shadows - innocence amid the murk.

There are kids in the streets playing at being killers, and the heavy gaze of a boy sitting beside his father's deathbed, the realisation of the weight of the world dawning on him. These are not the smiling carefree kids of Tish Murtha's work, but children whose youth is snuffed out prematurely by their circumstances, who have learned that resilience is required just to survive.

There's a film noir quality to the pictures, thanks to Battaglia's evidently instinctive understanding of light and dark. She may have been a photojournalist, but she was an artist too. Yet the aesthetic appeal of her images troubled her deeply, as it has many other photographers before and since. "I dreamed of burning my negatives", she says in a short video screened in the gallery, expressing disgust at her own work. "I want to take away the beauty that others see in them. I want to destroy them."

Battaglia saw photography as "a tool of denunciation and empowerment as well as documentation", and as a result she herself became a target; the exhibition also features a death threat sent as a dire warning. Ultimately, though, she took a grimly pessimistic view of the possibility of bringing about change: "Photography changes nothing. Violence continues, poverty continues."

Indeed they do, sadly - but a world without these stunning images would be a worse place.