For a phenomenon as heavily mythologized as the Sicilian mafia, the question of origins tends to dissolve into folklore. Klaus Pichler’s Fear Guards the Lemon Grove proceeds from a different premise: that the early Cosa Nostra can be examined through economic and social history. Drawing on analyses of two historical datasets on agriculture, social structure, and crime, the book considers the surge in demand for lemons that began in the first half of the nineteenth century as a major catalyst for organized crime on the island. The photographs approach this history through places, allowing present-day appearances to sit beside records of earlier uses and conflicts.

Published by Fw:Books in 2024, the 208-page softcover measures 165 by 235 millimeters and is printed in English, with texts by Arcangelo Dimico, Alessi Isopi, and Ola Olssen. Pichler’s photographs of sites connected to the early mafia are juxtaposed with historical images, documents, and quotations, arranged to trace the different stages by which this criminal enterprise took shape. The result is less a portrait of individuals than a study of conditions: land, labor, citrus, and contracts.

For collectors, the book’s interest lies in that method. The sequencing—photographs, archival material, and textual fragments in counterpoint—makes the book an argument rather than a survey, and the collaboration of economic historians supplies an evidentiary spine.

The volume’s subject is regional, but its implications are not: it concerns how legitimate commerce and organized crime can grow from the same soil. For a collection attentive to photography’s capacity for historical investigation, this is a considered addition.