Any photographer approaching the subject of the mafia’s impact on Sicilian society must necessarily work in the shadow of Letizia Battaglia, whose huge archive of often violent images, made between 1974 and 1992, amount to what she called “an archive of blood”. Battaglia worked on the frontline of the mafia’s war on the island’s civic society and its often fierce internal battles for power, chronicling the murders of judges, policemen, feuding mob bosses and ordinary citizens.
In Terra Nostra, Mimi Mollica, a London-based Sicilian, wisely eschews the photojournalist approach for a more nuanced exploration of the lingering effects of that relentless violence. I first came across his work in 2009, just after he had made the first of several journeys back to his native island. His task was a more complex one than Battaglia’s insofar as it was an attempt to convey the invisible but insidious presence of the mafia on the landscape and its people in a place where 95% of the region’s businesses were still subject to extortion by coercion.
Back then, I wrote that Mollica was “a master of what could be called the sideways glance” and Terra Nostra, seven years in the making, confirms that observation. Having watched the book take shape and written an essay for it, I can say it is a work that repays close attention. Among other things, it validates Mollica’s remark that Sicily is “essentially pre-modern, in that its deep-rooted traditions of community and family – in all its meanings – endure”.
This is not the cliched Sicily of so many American films that romanticise the mafia even as they portray its dark heart. Instead, in black and white, Mollica creates a Sicily of the imagination, both recognisably real and slightly otherworldly: a state of mind and an atmosphere as much as an actual place. His landscape photographs evoke a land of shadows and harsh sunlight, its terrain blighted by half-finished concrete buildings that, in some wide shots, appear at first glance to be ruins. The hills are pockmarked by empty, often ugly, holiday apartments, the mountains bisected by snaking freeways that curve past creeping suburbs of breeze block and steel.
In Palermo, the thriving heart of the island, he captures a woman praying to a statue of Padre Pio; a man leaning conspiratorially into the open window of a flash car. In both images, you can almost hear the whispers. There are several images of lone individuals peering curiously out of the frame: silent watchers alert to any slight rupture in the unruly rhythm of the city streets. Throughout, the violence of the society is suggested rather than spelt out. In one arresting picture, a market trader chats with a customer over a stall bearing a huge tuna fish, its eye pierced by a wooden stake on which a price tag is affixed.
Elsewhere, Mollica’s furtive street photographs veer from the intense – lovers caught in a public embrace; a newly married couple startling a flock of birds – to the ominous – an old man in a suit, his face gaunt, staring suspiciously at Mollica’s lens. He looks both haunted and defiant, and it is that uneasy atmosphere that Mollica’s understated images convey. An insider by birth and an outsider by vocation, his Sicily is a deft merging of the quotidian and the unsettling, a place where the violence may have subsided, but its legacy remains palpable.
Terra Nostra is published by Dewi Lewis (£35)
