Two photographers - Letizia Battaglia and Enrique Metinides - coming from the tradition of  photo-reportage, one - Arnold Odermatt - a former police officer who has recorded the car accidents witnessed when on duty: this exhibition talks about death and tragedy through the lens - at times rational, at others visceral - of three great artists. Fundamental figures in the history of photography, they recount events which are significant both to the path of mankind as to our everyday life, images that remain merely a background Story destined to produce a fleeting noise in our consciousness. 
By bravely documenting many of the most notorious Mafia homicides in her Sicilian homeland, Letizia Battaglia has composed a death-diary with complex meanings and implications on our society, on our way of being both witnesses and voyeurs, unaware consumers of images which belong to us and yet seem so distant. The Mafia is part of our history and these photographs have the power to unsettle us with their harshness and, at the same time, to project us into a far too realistic film. The stories told by Letizia Battaglia are also those of everyday Palermo, of the dramas on the street, in the courtyards and squares: the children and their future, the sad fate of some 
or the gaze of one that can - for a moment - change things and change us.
Enrique Metinides documents tragedy on the streets of his Mexico City: homicides, suicides, accidents, but also rescues as well as the extraordinary hope through which man can and knows how to react. His shots are often bloody and unforgiving, they show death and its effect on the surrounding reality: the casual witnesses of these misfortune, frequently visible in Metinides’ images, are fundamental components of the emotional construction of tragedy because they merge within other individual stories and their humanity. As in Letizia Battaglia’s images, in Metinides’ works the references to religious iconography – from the deposition from the cross, to the compassion scenes, to the Pietà -  add a further layer of interpretation to the story.
If Battaglia and Metinides project us into the mood of a gruesome film noir, Arnold Odermatt shows us the beauty of the accident in the moment when every allusion to death has been removed. Swiss police lieutenant for almost fifty years, Odermatt shoots his photographs after the rescue operation, when the only proofs of the accidents are the dented or smashed cars and the rubber signs left by their trajectories on the street. They are paradoxical situations, often on the verge of humour as they juxtapose the irrationality of the crash with the rigorous order of the spectators observing the scene. Odermatt’s photographs reveal an extreme precision, a sophisticated formal composition which makes them seem staged, while the automobile, monument to the unpredictability and chance of life, turns into a sculpture. Battaglia, Metinides and Odermatt seduce us with the unfathomable magnetism of disasters, killings, calamities. Their gaze, witness to disorder and the inevitability of evil, aesthetises misfortune, revealing it in its diverse and manifold implications: from personal to collective responses, the artists’ work stimulate a profound reflection on our way of reading and interpreting the representation of tragedy today.

text by Sarah Cosulich Canarutto