Ada Brunazzi – the photographing mountaineer

The shimmering, pink and purple light reaches over the icy landscape. It’s hard to keep your eyes open because of the bright light from the sun reflecting in the snow. Ada Brunazzi stands thousands of meters above the sea, on the top of Mount Blanc, it’s hard to breathe and it’s very windy, but she is going to take her pictures – the light is too perfect not to. 

The tempting nature

The nature photographer Ada Brunazzi, from Turin in north of Italy, has worked in photography for nearly 30 years. She has studied Modern Literature at the University of Turin and has a master in Marketing Communication from the Catholic University in Milano. As if that wasn’t enough, she has also taken several courses in photography and journalism. It was during her studies, when Ada and her classmates needed images for different projects, that she started to do some photographing on her own. She discovered her enjoyment of it and that she had a great talent for it as well. Subsequently she advanced by taking some more courses and improved her skills almost every day. She quickly discovered what her favorite motive was.

– Everything in the nature is inspiring to me. The lights, the shadows, the colors, bushes, trees, leafs, animals, rivers, mountains, there are so many different things to focus on. I always start a project in the nature, regardless if the commission is packaging design or a photo exhibition. I get my ideas from the nature and later I connect them with everything else I’m working with, says Ada Brunazzi. 

Chasing after the best shot

The agency Brunazzi & Associati was founded by Ada’s father Giovanni Brunazzi in 1985, and they create brand identity, marketing, advertising, packaging design, exhibitions and web design. They have worked with large Italian companies, such as the GDO company Crai and the venerable jewelry company Magno Gioielli. Ada specifically works with photography and her pictures have been published in many different projects, like in calendars, advertising campaigns and in books. She has, among other things, made a guide for alpinists, where the mountaineer Giuseppe Petigax describes how it is to climb on such high altitudes. Since mountaineering and nature are the things that Ada gets most inspired by, those things are, naturally, also the most commons motives for her photos. Another example is a work of hers that she did together with Arctic Paper, for the campaign Heart Works.

– The picture I took for the Heart Works campaign is one of my best pictures ever. It was in the beginning of the summer and we went up in the mountains to take a picture, which was going to represent creativity and nature. It was warm and thriving outside, and the air smelled like perfume from all the blooming flowers. We climbed even higher and had to use our cross country skies because the snow was still on the ground at that height. The climate and the light suddenly changed so drastically, and that was then I took the picture. It was a moment filled with sensation for me, says Ada Brunazzi.