Gabriele Basilico was born in Milan in 1944. He graduated in architecture from Milan Polytechnic in 1973 and started taking photographs in the same period, focusing on the city and the cityscape. In 1983, he had his first major exhibition at PAC in Milan - "Milano, ritratti di fabbriche".

Basilico received his first international assignment in 1984, when he was invited to participate in the Mission Photographique de la D.A.T.A.R., organised by the French Government to record the changes on France 's contemporary landscape.

Subsequently, he was invited to conduct photographic research in several European countries: Italy, France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Portugal.

In 1990, he was awarded the "Prix Mois de la Photo" in Paris for the exhibition "Porti di Mare". He designed and produced the exhibition and the book "Bord de Mer".

In 1991, he took part in the Mission Photographique on the city of Beirut, devastated by war.

In 1994, the Fondazione/Galleria Gottardo in Lugano devoted an extensive retrospective to 15 years of his photographs (1978-93), collected in the book "L'esperienza dei luoghi".

At the 6th architecture exhibition of the Venice Biennale (1996), he received the Osella d'Oro prize for photographs of contemporary architecture.

In 1999, he published the book "Cityscapes" illustrating his work from 1984 in 330 pictures. This book led to an exhibition with the same title, presented in Spring 2000 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and, subsequently, at the CPF (Centro Portugues de Fotografia) in Porto, MART (Museo d'Arte Moderna di Trento e Rovereto) in Trento, and MAMBA (Museo de Arte Moderno) in Buenos Aires.

In the summer of the same year, he conducted a study on metropolitan Berlin at the invitation of DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst).

In 2000, the IVAM (Instituto Valencia de Arte Moderno) in Valencia asked Basilico to produce a photographic investigation on the city of Valencia for the exhibition and book " Milano, Berlin, Valencia". In 2001, he conducted an extensive campaign entitled L.R.19/98 on disused sites in the Emilia Romagna region. He also started in-depth research into the archaeological zone in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region, on which he drew for the "Provincia Antiqua" exhibition for the 33rd Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles.

In June 2002, PhotoEspana awarded him the prize for the best photographic book of the year, for the book " Berlin".

A major review of his works dating from 1978 opened at GAM (Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Turin in the summer of 2002, with another in September at GAMEC (Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Bergamo entitled "Paesaggio Contemporaneo", a dialogue based on photographs and painting with the artist Salvo.

In the same year, the Provincia Autonoma di Trento asked him to produce a major work to create a record of the provincial area, which ended with an exhibition at MART (Museo d'Arte Moderna di Trento e Rovereto) in Rovereto.

2003 witnessed a return to two places that have been significant in the course of Gabriele Basilico's career:
- northern France , where at the invitation of the city of Cherbourg , he re-travelled and re-observed the same landscape covered in 1984-5 for the D.A.T.A.R. campaign
- and Beirut, where for the journal Domus he photographed the, now reconstructed, city centre from the same observation points as in 1991.

These two returns resulted in the two books "Bord de Mer" and " Beirut" 1991 (2003).

In 2003, he also participated in the 5th International Biennial of Architecture and Design in Saõ Paulo with an exhibition of photographs specially taken in Portugal on recent Portuguese architecture. The same exhibition was presented at the Milan Triennale with the title "Disegnare la città" in January 2004.

In the very same month, the exhibitions L.R. 19/98, on disused sites in the Emilia Romagna region, and the extended version of "Bord de Mer" opened in the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Mass.

In March 2004, CGAC (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea) in Santiago de Compostela presented the work entrusted to Gabriele Basilico, with another nine European artists, for a research project on the Galician city.

In the autumn of 2004, he took part in the exhibition "Arti e Architettura 1900-2000" in Palazzo Ducale in Genoa and produced two photographic campaigns on the cities of Barcelona and Mantua for the project "Postcard City", Mantova-Barcellona, Città della Cultura for the exhibition with the same title in Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua. The Regione Campania invited him to produce a number of new shots of Naples for the exhibition "Obiettivo Napoli". "Luoghi memorie immagini", in the Sala Dorica in Palazzo Reale, scheduled for Spring 2005.