Sicilian photographer and photojournalist Letizia Battaglia: exhibition in Liverpool.

Letizia Battaglia worked on the front-line as a photo-reporter during one of the most tragic periods in contemporary Italian history, known as the ‘anni di piombo’ – ‘the years of (flying) lead’.

She took up photography in the early 1970s, when she realised that, as a journalist, it was easier to place her articles in newspapers and magazines if these were accompanied by images.

After a short period spent in Milan, where she met her partner and collaborator Franco Zecchin, Letizia Battaglia returned to Sicily in 1974. After relocating to Palermo and regularly contributing to the daily L’Ora, she became the pictures editor until the newspaper was shut down in 1990.

Over the years, Battaglia has recorded her love/hate relationship to her home country with (com)passion and dedication, often putting her life at risk.

By alternating stark images of death, graphic violence and intimidation connected to the Mafia with poetic still-life photos and intense portraiture of children and women, Battaglia provides a textured and layered narrative of that country.

“[These were] eighteen years in which the ferocious Corleonesi mafia clan would claim the lives of governors, senior policemen, entire mafia families and, ultimately, two of Battaglia’s dearest friends: the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino,” Peter Jinks wrote in The Observer in 2012.

Battaglia didn’t only photograph corpses. She ranged across Sicily, taking in religious festivals, psychiatric hospitals, crumbling slums and aristocratic salons.

She no longer does reportage, and told Jinks she was “too old to keep walking the streets”, but she regularly visits schools and attends anti-mafia events.

“It means setting an example,” she said. “It means opposing the mafia in everything that I say and buy and eat. Every person that I meet, every gesture that I make, it’s all connected to the need to liberate my country from the mafia.”

“The mafia can be beaten,” she said, “but only if people stop voting for dishonest politicians. It’s no longer just a Sicilian problem. It’s all over Italy.”

The selected works on show at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery from 22 February illustrate this period and document Battaglia’s attempt to come to terms with that history and reconcile her love for her country with the memory of some very dramatic events.

The Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool exhibition of her work is her first in the UK.

Letizia Battaglia was born in 1935 in Palermo, Sicily. In 1985, she became a politician, hoping to take on the mafia. “I lasted 10 years,” she told the Guardian recently. “In retrospect, I only wasted time I could have dedicated to photography.”

Drawing from her personal archive, comprising of over 600,000 images, this exhibition showcases work spanning from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s and also includes some recent projects.

The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to approach her genre-defining photographic practice – often linked to that of American ‘crime’ photographer Weegee – and reflect on the role of photography as an individual and collective means for taking action, bearing witness, providing evidence and documenting history.

The exhibition, Letizia Battaglia: Breaking The Code of Silence, runs from 22 February until 4 May.