Late last year I took a detour to the New Art Gallery, Walsall to see a small exhibition of William Blake's illustrations, Angels and Imagination. The real revelation came when I took the escalator to the top floor, here were a series of black and white prints by photographer Giacomo Brunelli, Animals. Small inky black prints with hand cut rounded corners and black borders they were intensely intimate and personal images of chanced upon encounters with animals, often domestic, both dead and alive. They're wild, feral, dogs snarl, cats cower, small mammals die, and the photographer is right in amongst them, there's hardly any distance between his camera and the subject.
He uses an old Miranda 35mm SLR camera to take these pictures, a camera that used to belong to his dad, and prints his black and white film in a makeshift darkroom. He likes to work in the half-light and many times in the series the subject is picked out by a limited depth of field against a blurred background. He's a hunter in the early mornings, going out to see what he can find, and the images portray a powerful personal vision of mostly dark and light, brutal and energetic, and strangely uplifting.
www.giacomobrunelli.com
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