'Giacomo Brunelli has been looking hard at animals. His focus is not on the framed and caged exotica of zoos but on the ordinary animals that remain with us to some extent: horses, dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons. He shows us a fox, looking sharply at the camera and poised to flee, and there are numerous birds, a snake and several toads, but this wildness is small and fragile, living in the familiar liminal space where manmade and natural meet and overlap. His animals inhabit farmyards, cobbled streets and the facades of stone buildings. There are no tigers here.Brunelli's animals are often composed only of suggestive fragments. His spare black and white images are attuned to the nuances of a moving mane, a silhouetted whisker, a highlighted, almost illuminated wing. He favours the profile and the counterintuitive angle, setting dark unobservable features against dark undiscernable backgrounds. A dead mouse, on its back, paws in air beside an oversized flower against a stark and distant mountain is no more or less frozen in time than is the growling dog, eyes alight and teeth forever bared; both are icons of states we fear but cannot know. These pictures are timeless and uncanny, powerful in their ordinariness, and emotionally much bigger than their simple subjects' - Alison Nordstrom, Curator of Photography, George Eastman House.
About the Author
Born in Perugia, Italy, and a graduate in international communication, Giacomo Brunelli took up photography seven years ago and in that short pperiod has built an enviable reputation. For the past three years he has been developing his unique series of photographs of animals. The work has already won a number of prizes including a Sony World Photography Award and the Gran Prix Lodz, Poland and has been exhibited in the UK, the USA, Poland, Switzerland and France. He has also featured widely in the art and photography press including Katalog (Denmark), Foto & Video (Russia), Zoom (France) and Photo (France).
