MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Life with Sicily’s Mafia
ANNA SERGI recommends the first UK exhibition of a remarkable female photographer who studied the impact of mafia violence on everyday life
(L - R) Cala neighbourhood, the little girl with the ball, Palermo, 1980; He was killed on his way to the garage to get his car, Palermo, 1976; Near the Church of Santa Chiara, the killer’s game, Palermo, 1982
[© Courtesy Archivio Letizia Battaglia] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily
Photographers’ Gallery, London
WHEN we look at pictures of conflict, violence and collective trauma we might expect to see only the horrors of maimed bodies and the crying souls of the victims. But in the photographs of one of Italy’s most cherished photographers, Letizia Battaglia, you do not see glamorised shots of the perpetrators because her images aren’t about them. They are about places and people.
The horror is there, but you also see flowers, a football, engaged crowds, and children in the street. Sure enough, some of these children hold guns because her pictures capture the normality that exists around the brutal violence in daily life.
Letizia Battaglia was born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1935 and was among the first women reporters in Italy. She died in 2022. She travelled the world with her pictures and won several awards for her photo-journalism.
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