Working for a period of years on a daily newspaper is a great education, especially in a place like Palermo, where at any moment you might see someone you knew -a policeman, a journalist, a magistrate- killed by an assassin. And so we told ourselves that we could no longer go on being passive witnesses to these massacres: we had in our hands a tool that could be used to inform people and to combat the phenomenon by helping to forge a new awareness. At that time, the word "mafia" could not be pronounced in a public place. Everyone was terrorised. We began to organise exhibitions of photographs to denounce the Mafia and expose its true face. In a newspaper, this sort of thing remains superficial, ephemeral, sporadic; while an exhibition of photographs, displayed all together in a public place, immediately reveals the gravity of the situation and the responsibilities that lie behind it. I remember the first exhibition we put together: it was shown in schools, in villages, in town squares. People were afraid to come up and take a close look at the pictures...

I also worked with the foreign press, the Americans, the British, the French, the Japanese... I was their correspondent in Sicily.

In 1985 Letizia Battaglia submitted her portfolio for the Eugene Smith Prize, and won it - that was an important international recognition, and it encouraged us to continue.

In 1988 I was enrolled by the Magnum Agency.

This was a tremendous experience, for I had to leave Sicily and work as a photographer for major magazines, dealing with problems that had never come my way before. But with Magnum there were problems of comprehension, and I didn't want to lose my passion for photography. So after three years, I left.

Working with Magnum gave me my first opportunity to travel to the Eastern Bloc. This was before the Wall came down, and it was still possible then to produce pictures in a neo-realistic style, like the '50s in the West. And I was fascinated to see that on the other side of Europe people lived a different everyday reality, with different day-to-day problems. I began to explore Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Georgia... What mainly interested me in these countries was their cultural, artistic, political and economic life.

In 1990 I spent four months working in Silesia (southwest Poland), the most polluted region in Europe, on the effects of pollution on health. I felt compelled to dig deeply into all the associated social problems. This project also permitted me to deliver the results of my investigation to the University of Katowice in the form of an exhibition, which continues to manage it to this day. This was accompanied by a written report, which was approved by the University before the exhibition was opened.

After the collapse of the communist regimes, the East became a favourite playground for photo reporters. Events had left me behind, and the newspapers and magazines were saturated with facile and stereotyped pictures.

In 1991 I decided to go and live in Paris. My work denouncing the Mafia was no longer as necessary as before: by this time a collective awareness had developed and the subject was well covered by the media. My life and work in Palermo was no longer satisfying, and had become a pointless risk. I was a photographer before I became the photographer of the Mafia, and this label was hobbling my creative spirit. And so I abandoned a professionally privileged position (for I had become internationally famous for my work on the Mafia) to plunge into a marketplace that was seriously affected by the economic crisis, and where I had no certainty that I could make a place for myself.