Ciro Battiloro’s Silence is a Gift, published by Chose Commune in March 2024, gathers 52 black-and-white plates made in three places in Southern Italy: Rione Sanità in Naples, Santa Lucia in Cosenza, and Torre del Greco, the photographer’s birthplace. Over time Battiloro photographed households in these neighborhoods, returning often enough that the camera becomes a familiar presence rather than an intrusion. The publisher frames the book as a door into that intimacy, and the photographs are inhabited by named individuals and by the ordinary occasions of family life — the ISBNDB description notes children and relatives in and around Naples, while the publisher speaks of births, children growing into adolescence, partings. The method is participatory: Battiloro enters daily life by sharing it, and his images lean toward vitality rather than destitution.
Erri De Luca contributes the text, and Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi is responsible for concept, editing and sequencing as well as the design, made with Perrine Serre. The sequence is therefore not a loose gathering of pictures but an edited arc that moves among love and loneliness, pain and joy, life and death. The book is produced as a section-sewn hardcover of 92 pages at 22.5 by 25 centimetres, with texts in English, French and Italian. It is a first edition.
For collectors, the interest lies in the collaboration and the form rather than any rarity claim. Chose Commune has become known for carefully made books, and here the editor’s hand is explicit: an artist working in a long-term documentary mode, a writer of De Luca’s standing, and a considered design all converging on a small, deliberately paced volume. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards in the First Book category.
Battiloro, born in 1984 in Torre del Greco and based in Naples, studied philosophy at the University of Naples Federico II before specializing in documentary photography. His work has been published in magazines and shown in museums, galleries and festivals. In this first book, that philosophical training is legible: the title proposes silence as something given and received, and the photographs argue for attention to ordinary lives in places marked by modern tragedies without reducing those lives to their wounds.
What distinguishes the project is this refusal of the merely marginal. The book concerns intimacy and resistance, and it treats Southern Italy as a place of continuity — children becoming parents, households persisting — rather than a subject for distant observation. Readers who follow contemporary documentary photobooks, and who care about the meeting of photographs, text and design, will find it a durable and quietly serious addition to a shelf.
