Going away for work or study from the province, especially in the south, in many cases becomes a final farewell, and one’s own remote town becomes only a summer destination in which to find family ties and little else. Michele Battilomo from Basilicata has never left, Matera has remained his home and over the years the subject of his photographic series.
As a self-taught photographer, he began his career under the stages of musical events, with the lights of lighthouses creating color shows that helped him become aware of the importance of light management in photography as well.

Michele Battilomo’s goal is to enhance the subject, put him at the center and understand his relationship with the land, the relationship between the individual and a shrinking community, while what remains seems even more symbiotic with its context.
The photographer’s production, however, like these photographs in the Lonely Boy and De-Population series, does not consist of a reportage of the depopulation of Basilicata. Bettilomo wants to try to spectacle the everyday, that which by nature is not spectacle as it is motionless and traversed by a slowly unfolding energy. The contrast and the ambiguous, the ironic and the disquieting, a theater of the absurd staged by a company of ordinary people, oscillating between fantasy and a desire for redemption.