David Pisani’s photographic work can be summed up as a relentless pursuit of the sublime and the erotic.

His earliest works (c. 1980’s) already showed a deep concern with the representation of the human body, the erotic nature of places and objects as fetishism and the inevitable association to sexuality and death; themes which are consistently present in all his work.

The link between decay and architecture is most evident in his photographic essay on the city of Valletta and the red-light district of Strait Street entitled ‘Vanishing Valletta’ which was first exhibited in Paris in 1996 during the Biennale of photography: Mois de la Photo à Paris under the title “La Valette et le Grand Port – Portrait d’une Capitale Maritime”. In the year 2000 a selection of the Vanishing Valletta archive was included in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Pisani has also produced photo essays on the city of Dubai, the conflict zones in Cyprus and the city of Kyoto in Japan.

In 1998 he confronted the theme of the human body with a more explicit treatment of the themes of decay and death and produced a seminal body of work entitled “EVERY-BODY” developing a unique photographic chemical process that causes the image to alter itself over time as does the human body that grows old, dies and decomposes.

He is a fanatical darkroom printer with more than 25 years experience in commercial and fine art printing.

David Pisani portrait
Untitled, 1989. Silver gelatin print.
Untitled, 1989. Silver gelatin print.