Matteo Battaglia is a photographer from Italy.
He was born in 1999 and since he was 14 years old he has been using the medium of photography to narrate the world around him, experimenting across all kinds of photographic genres and always questioning himself over the true meaning and purpose of a photograph.
His artistic production has reached a new awareness at the beginning of this year, when he started thinking of the photograph as both an artwork and a document that testifies the presence or the absence of something in a specific time and place.
His project Presenza / Assenza was selected as one of the 120 finalists of Arte Laguna Prize 2026. The work is a reflection over the current state of things through their absence: the landscape is seen as a result of a past presence or of a potential future one. The object also displays a different kind of self-portrait of the author: the landscape with the trace on the ground is precisely the way he perceived himself at the exact moment when he took the photo, framing in a fraction of a second a perfect portrait of himself as the specific combination of time and space.
