Shobha
In the foreground two elderly sisters sit composedly in two elegant armchairs. Behind the noblewomen is a large salon with 19th-century furnishings. The image is part of the reportage Gli ultimi Gattopardi (The Last Leopards), with which Shobha, Letizia Battaglia’s daughter, won the 1998 World Press Photo award. A Sicilian herself, the photographer gained access to the private lives and homes of the island’s aristocracy, a world apart, at the same time austere and surreal.
A scene in a swimming pool, perhaps a private club, in any case a privileged situation. A girl happily dives under the gaze of her mother and grandmother, also posing. The image is part of the reportage Gli ultimi Gattopardi (The Last Leopards), with which Shobha, Letizia Battaglia’s daughter, won the 1998 World Press Photo award. A Sicilian herself, the photographer gained access to the private lives and homes of the island’s aristocracy, a world apart, at the same time austere and surreal.
A young woman in an evening dress poses confidently winking under the portrait of an ancestress. The image is part of the reportage Gli ultimi Gattopardi (The Last Leopards), with which Shobha, Letizia Battaglia’s daughter, won the 1998 World Press Photo award. A Sicilian herself, the photographer gained access to the private lives and homes of the island’s aristocracy, a world apart, at the same time austere and surreal.
SHOBHA began her career as a photojournalist in 1981 working for the agency “Informazione fotografica”, a collective of photographers from Palermo founded by her mother Letizia Battaglia. She has covered the mafia wars in Italy and issues of international politics. She received the “World Press Photo” award for her project on the Sicilian aristocracy Gli Ultimi Gattopardi (1998) and for Gli Angeli della Medina (2002), a photo essay on the African fashion stylist Oumou-Sy. She focuses her camera on the female condition, mainly in black and white. Alongside photography, she uses video in Cambogia: Wat Lanka (2010), a project about the Buddhist monks who escaped the genocide of Pol Pot; Quando l’acido sfigura anche l’anima (2012), a record of female victims of acid attacks; Breathing Dust – dee della polvere (2013), on female construction workers in India. *She was born in Palermo in 1954, she lives and works in Goa and Palermo.