Giacomo Brunelli was born in Perugia, Italy in 1977. He graduated with a degree in International Communications in 2002 and attended a six-month photojournalism course in Rome. He immigrated to London in 2008 and has since developed an internationally recognised practice in black and white photography, and is known for sustained commissions in London, New York and Hamburg.
Photographer Giacomo Brunelli was born in Perugia, Italy in 1977. He grew up on a farm in the Umbrian countryside, spending much of his childhood surrounded by animals, an environment that proved central to his later artistic practice. His father was an amateur photographer who kept a Miranda Sensomat camera, a 35mm SLR manufactured in Japan during the 1960s, in a desk drawer. Brunelli has described his initial attraction as being to the object itself, upon its discovery, before understanding what it could do. He has used this camera throughout his career. Having graduated with a degree in International Communications in 2002, he attended a six-month course in photojournalism in Rome, where he was then living. He first began photographing the city on foot, developing what he described as a fascination with the traditional approach to photojournalism: on the streets, shooting in black and white, with what he called 'its very violent approach to the subject' (Davies, 2014). He immigrated to London in 2008 with his wife and young daughter.
Brunelli works exclusively in black and white, loading Kodak Tri-X 400 film into his father's Miranda camera and relying entirely on natural available light. He develops and handprints all his work in a makeshift darkroom at home, producing gelatin silver prints on Ilford fibre-based paper. He states that: 'Walking is part of my photography. You need to walk to create the chance of finding things that interest you' (Davies, 2014). He photographs during extended daily walks, selecting a subject, a person, animal or statue, to follow discreetly before capturing his image. Working with a removable viewfinder, he photographs from the hip, from directly behind his subjects and with extreme close-up, resulting in images in which figures appear as stark, dramatically lit silhouettes. Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers' Gallery, has situated his work within the tradition of émigré photographers — such as the German- and Austrian-born Bill Brandt and Wolfgang Suschitzky — who brought new visual intensity to photographing London, while noting that Brunelli's aesthetic is less documentary and more personal, informed by a film noir sense of disquietude (Rogers, 2014).
Brunelli began his major series The Animals in 2005, photographing horses, dogs, cats, chickens and other animals encountered on daily morning walks in Umbria and Lazio in Italy. The series was presented in a solo exhibition at The New Art Gallery, Walsall in 2008, and was concurrently published as a monograph. Writing of the work, Alison Nordstrom, then Curator of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, described the images as 'timeless and uncanny, powerful in their ordinariness' (Nordstrom, 2008). In 2012, The Photographers' Gallery commissioned Brunelli to produce a new body of work on the capital, resulting in Eternal London (2014), developed through daily morning walks of five to six hours across central London over two years. It was selected by Martin Parr for the group exhibition Strange and Familiar at the Barbican Centre, London, in 2016. In 2015, the Deichtorhallen Museum for Photography in Hamburg, in collaboration with the magazine Flaneur, commissioned a series on the German city; this was exhibited at the Triennial of Photography Hamburg in 2015 and at Robert Morat Galerie, Hamburg, in 2017, and published by Editions Bessard, Paris, in 2021. Between 2017 and 2019, Brunelli produced a series on New York City, exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery in 2019 and published by Skinnerboox, Italy, in 2020. A series on Venice, begun in January 2020 in the wake of the city's most severe flooding in over 50 years, was self-published under his own imprint, TantoPress, in 2022, followed by Birds, published by Editions Bessard in 2024.
Brunelli has received several significant awards, including the Sony World Photography Award in the Nature category in 2008, selected from nearly 45,000 entries, the Grand Prix of Fotofestiwal Lodz in 2008, and the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award in 2009. Giacomo Brunelli lives and works in Wimbledon, London, England. His work is held in UK public collections, including The New Art Gallery Walsall, and internationally at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA; the Portland Art Museum, USA; and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan.
Michal Mel
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Giacomo Brunelli]
Publications related to [Giacomo Brunelli] in the Ben Uri Library