commercial and fine art photographer based in Lugano, Switzerland

My first book "Comme Un Dieu"

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In Comme un Dieu, Italian-born, Switzerland-based photographer Federico Pompei explores the powerful mythology of the Tauromachy, recontextualising this ancient practice in today’s social, political, and cultural ecosystem.

Shot in the Camargue region over two years, this body of work follows the bulls and their guardians as they prepare for the yearly festivals across southern France.

Embedding himself within local families of breeders —the manades —Pompei portrays the journey of the bull and abstracts the animal’s essence as a subject of cultural history and ancestral reminiscence.

The Provençal tradition of the Tauromachy, through the photographer’s lens, assumes the depth of an inquiry suspended between cultural ethnography and anthropology. Rituals, heritage, and myths around the bull emerge as the leitmotif of Comme un Dieu, and furthermore, they become a point of reflection to investigate how the past and the future blend together, with the bull as its pivotal simulacrum.

In framing Tauromachy, this photography series avoids any clichés related to the area’s particular vernacular, and proposes an open-ended analysis of the phenomenon that incorporates the symbolic, the historic, and the cultural. The myth of the bull is proposed as an allegory that is far removed from any act of violence, but that furthers the idea of the animal as a sacred divinity for the Camarguese people, rendering its portrayal as dignified, empathic, and ancestral — the bull as a symbol of perfection. Comme un Dieu, ultimately, is a proposition towards a theory of beauty, a dimension in which the divine and the mundane converge.

– Federico Sargentone, writer and editor