Italian photographer Giacomo Brunelli has been photographing animals in backyards, fields and farms since 2005, and defines his work as 'animal-focused street photography'.

By pushing the lens to its closest point of focus, almost touching the subject, he forces the animals to either flight or fight, which is exactly the moment he releases the shutter. It is all about capturing that moment of reaction, triggered through various approaches that vary from animal to animal. Whether it is ignoring them, running after them or using their natural curiosity for the shot, Brunelli's images are striking for their immediacy as a direct consequence of the intervention by the photographer.

Shot with a Japanese camera from the '60s, Brunelli's use of morning twilight or diffused light on a cloudy day adds to the haziness of the atmosphere and the fleetingness of the moment.

In her foreword to Brunelli's book, Alison Nordström writes:

"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."

—LensCulture

The Animals
Photographs by Giacomo Brunelli, foreword by Alison Nordström
Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing
Hardcover: 72 pages