David Picchiottino’s photographic approach is very influenced by the light and the silence of the places surrounding us, when they find their soul, when human presence has disappeared.
He is interested in the pictorial representation’s function of images. How did the people in the past represent their everyday life? How did they capture it in images?
He re-learned how to see these many a time seen paintings, at these grand works which somewhat are, like his pictures, pictorial representations of this everyday life that interests him so.
The sharpness of primitive Flemish (Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memling), the mystery of Leonard de Vinci’s paintings, the light of Vermeer and the way he paints his daily life, the mystery and melancholy of Hopper.
He try more and more to go in this direction, «to paint» more than to photograph his subjects.
He also put a certain distance between the subjects and the camera. This allows him to show the places and the people the way he want to, and lets the spectator’s imagination working.
In his work, Suddenly time slows down, and we feel drawn by his contemplative gaze, in a way we are letting him take us on journey within each image. His is a silent, spacious world, this is a space where you can hear yourself breathing and each step reverberates.
Even though his work is always found, not staged, and as he says himself sometimes it’s a split second feeling that makes him take the shot, it all feel very deliberate, suspended in a timeless zone, asking the audience to take it all in detail by detail.
His themes are quite broad, he moves freely between derelict American cities, wild landscapes, intimate interior shots bathed in soft light and fashion. What is interesting though, the work does not feel disjointed, even while touching a broad spectrum of subjects. His attention to detail, great colour use and a certain romantic melancholy binds it all together – you definitely feel you’re in a hand of someone who knows what he wants to say and has the mastery over the means of doing it.
Each one will go his own way, which won’t always be his. An image must stay open, breath. It needs air. Breaking free, telling a story.