Introduction
INTRODUCTION “THE ANIMALS” (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2008)
by Alison Nordström, Curator of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
In his seminal 1980 essay Why Look at Animals?, John Berger describes a dual
but not in any way contradictory human-animal relationship: ‘They belonged
there and here. Likewise they were mortal and immortal. They were subjected
and worshipped, bred and sacrificed.’ He asserts that the physical and temporal
removal of animals from most of our lives has come with the rise of capitalism,
the spread of industrialisation and the end of peasantry, but that the power of
animals as metaphor, mystery and elemental spirit remains. For Berger, animals
are the quintessential Other, and we look at them to define and discover ourselves.
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 man-made and natural meet and overlap. His animals inhabit
farmyards, cobbled streets and the façades 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 silhou-
etted whisker, a highlighted, almost illuminated wing. He favours the profile and
the counterintuitive angle, setting dark unobser vable 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. In them we find scraps of barely remembered troubled dreams, or even
the barely retained remnants of that first consciousness that informed ancestral
hands and minds in the caves of Chauvet Pont d Arc and Lascaux some 30,000
years ago.
There is a strong implication of apocalypse in the intensity of lighting and setting
of these curious and compelling images. In one, a white horse pulls itself
upright from a prone position against a glowering sky horizoned by a dense line
of indistinguishable trees. It is all powerful muscular flanks and determined
muzzle, clearly something more than a horse in a field but nothing that can be
kenned by intellect. That same ominous sky appears again behind a stretching,
possibly snarling, housecat, the edge of its forepaw lit, its head and whiskers
minimally picked out by the light, while black trees loom and clouds gather from
the thick black border that establishes the image as a primal monster. Similarly,
an ambiguous quadrapedal skeleton crouches in perpetuity against a barely
visible backdrop of mountain and fog. We recognise it as animal and as dead, but
that is all. These are creatures of darkness emerging from darkness; we know
them but we do not know what they mean.
Pictures in a book may convey only part of the material nature and tactile
experience of the photographs they represent. It is important to note here that
Brunelli has chosen to keep his black-bordered pictures small and to round their
corners like those of a nineteenth century cabinet card. They are, thus, intimate
and contemplative, set in a distinctive universe altogether separate from the epic
oversized colour work so prevalent today. They are secret and magical, with the
power and intensity of totem, fetish, myth. They are quiet little stories that we tell
ourselves because we have always known them. They fit our hands.
Brunelli’s black and white images are straightforward but not uncomplicated and,
taken together, they demonstrate the magical ability of the photograph both
to trace and transform what we see. They show us what something looks like,
asserting unquestionably that this is a horse’s eye, a dog ’s neck, or the stance of a
swan, but they also transcend this factual specificity to tap into something huge,
persistent and ineffable. The success of these pictures is not in the information
they provide, though the artist ’s visual delight in such information may be the
source of his strength and consistency. These pictures work because they take us
past information to emotion, both the artist ’s and our own, and perhaps past
emotion to something else that embodies both the fascination and the fear of
being part of the world we inhabit.
linkedin