Giuseppe Leone, the photographer who chronicled Sicily all his life, has died

He told Sicily in black and white. The landscapes, the figures, the festivals, the traditions and the suggestions of an island that her “eye” made unique and extraordinary. The great photographer Giuseppe Leone has died at the age of 87. from Ragusa, author of more than 50 volumes of photography which narrate through images a continent of art, beauty, poetry and tradition.

Sicily “muse and home”, the photographer was known above all for having described the landscapes and customs of Sicily from the 1950s to the present day. An exhibition of his was inaugurated just yesterday dedicated to the peasant world set up at the museum of Palazzo Zacco, in Ragusa.

Son of the organist of the cathedral of Ragusa, Giuseppe Leone began following his father when weddings were celebrated at just six years old. In the large baroque church he remains fascinated by those extraordinary shows. His father would have liked him to be an organist too, but the boy would like to be a painter when, seeing the photographer Antoci at work during a wedding ceremony, he asks him if he can go to his workshop.

It begins like this, at the age of 14 he enters a darkroom for the first time. That year, 1952, he already took one of his most famous photographs: the train with the steam locomotive passing over the bridge over the San Leonardo stream with Ragusa Ibla in the background. At 21, having purchased his first bellows camera, he opened his studio dedicated above all to wedding photography, but, at the same time, he continued a personal work of testimony, excavation, investigation, bordering on vivisection, of the Sicilian landscape that it hasn’t stopped since then.