Giacomo Brunelli’s The Animals, published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2008, turns away from zoological spectacle. Its subjects are horses, dogs, cats, chickens and pigeons, joined by a fox, birds, a snake and toads—the creatures encountered around farmyards, streets and stone buildings rather than behind zoo barriers. Brunelli places them in the unstable territory where domestic life and the nonhuman world meet.

The photographs are spare, high-contrast studies in black and white. Animals frequently appear as fragments: a mane caught in motion, whiskers reduced to silhouette, a wing lifted by light. Profiles and oblique angles deny the descriptive completeness expected of conventional animal photography, while dark bodies merge with backgrounds that reveal little. Familiar species become difficult to read, at once physically immediate and psychologically remote.

Brunelli does not sentimentalize this proximity. A fox faces the camera as if ready to escape; a dog remains fixed in a snarl; a dead mouse lies beside an oversized flower against a distant mountain. Such images hold alertness, aggression, vulnerability and death without converting them into a simple narrative. The book’s tension comes from the limits of human interpretation: these animals share our built environment, yet their states remain inaccessible to us.

With an introduction by photography curator Alison Nordström, The Animals gives sustained form to a distinct approach to animal portraiture—one grounded in ordinary encounters, suggestive detail and an uncanny use of darkness. For a serious photobook collection, its relevance lies not in exotic subject matter but in the discipline with which Brunelli transforms the commonplace. It is a focused study of how framing, tonal compression and partial visibility can unsettle the boundary between observation and projection.