TOKYO-2016

Matera cityscapes

  • Photographer
    Attilio

A sunny day in the ancient city of Matera, Italy, with its cave-houses called “sassi” that design quite a monochromatic cityscape. Matera was founded in the Paleolithic age. The Sassi were inhabited until the 50’s of the 20th century, when people lived in the cave-houses together with animals. So the Sassi were qualified as a “national shame” and they were abandoned. In the following decades they were restored and Matera was rediscovered as a city unique in the world. In 1983 Matera was chosen as Unesco World Heritage and it will be the European Capital for Culture in 2019.

I live in Potenza, Italy, where I work as a green building engineer. My attention is directed mainly to document the territory where I live, through urban photography and landscapes, in which I'm always searching for traces of human presence. I often focus on spaces that can tell us something about people living and using them, even beyond their aestethic appearance. I have a minimalist approach to the world of photography. I think that in photography it’s better to subtract things rather than to add them. Simplicity for me it is a value.