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The images of Sicily by the great Italian photographer Franco Zecchin who was part of the Magnum agency are finally gathered in this superb album for which he wrote a very personal and committed text about his life and his job as a photographer.

Franco Zecchin photographed Sicily from 1975 to 1994, during the years of the ”mafia war” but also of mobilizations and citizen engagement. The photos presented in this book are born from the voltage between aesthetic research and social criticism. Mafia brutality and its procession of murders and massacres are echoed by lawsuits and funerals. Life experiences in psychiatric hospitals are followed by historical or religious festivals, places of exchange and social relations in a dense context which is open to the world. Student struggles and demonstrations against US military bases remind us that Sicily is not only the cradle of the mafia but also the one of the anti-mafia and many social experiments.

”Sicily offers the synthesis of so many problems and so many contradictions which aren’t only Italian but also European, that it could represent the metaphor of the world of today”, said Leonardo Sciascia. I would like these images to contribute to reactivating the collective memory and to renewing the social commitment”.

Born in 1953 in Milan, Franco Zecchin arrived to Palermo in 1975 where he became a professional photographer working on the Mafia, political corruption and social conditions in Sicily. In 1980, he was among the founders of the Giuseppe Impastato Documentation Center against the Mafia. He plays theater and makes films at the Palermo Psychiatric Hospital. In 1988, he became a ”nominated” member of the Magnum Agency. Between 1989 and 1991, he conducted a photographic survey on the relationship between industrial pollution and public health in Silesia (Poland) followed by a photographic research on nomadism and the use of environmental resources studying a dozen companies in different parts of the world. Today, he lives and works in Marseille where, alongside his photography training activities, he continues exploring the relationship between land appropriation and social practices through photography.