Sometimes a photographic series does not begin with a camera. Sometimes it begins with an idea that takes hold and refuses to let go. That is how it was with De Lupo Domito.
The story of the Wolf of Gubbio has been with me for a long time. Saint Francis of Assisi encounters a wolf that terrorizes the surrounding countryside, makes peace with it, and integrates it into the community. The legend is usually told as the triumph of peace over violence. Francis appears as the mediator who restores order and tames the wild. On the surface, it is a beautiful story.
And yet it would not leave me alone.
The longer I thought about it, the less interested I became in Francis. Instead, I found myself wondering what this story actually means for the wolf. The wolf is almost always treated as a problem to be solved. A danger. A threat. A disruption of order. Yet hardly anyone asks how the story looks from the wolf’s perspective.
The wolf hunts. The wolf kills. The wolf eats. One may accuse it of many things, but not of being anything other than a wolf. It was at precisely this point that I began to feel a resonance.
Because I know that feeling.
Not because I devour people or prey on sheep. At least, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no formal complaints. But I do know the feeling of parts of one’s own nature being repeatedly asked to become something other than what they are.
Every human being knows this experience in one form or another. We are told to be authentic, but not too authentic. Honest, but not inconvenient. Individual, but only within acceptable limits. At some point this thought condensed itself into a single sentence:
“Be yourself. Unless other people are around. Then be someone else.”
The sentence was originally meant as sarcasm. Anyone who knows me is aware that I would never pretend to be sarcastic. Unfortunately, it also describes a surprisingly large portion of human reality.
The longer I reflected on the legend, the more clearly I saw that it contains a philosophical tension extending far beyond medieval Umbria. The Scottish philosopher David Hume distinguished between what is and what ought to be. The wolf simply is a wolf. Only human beings begin to judge. Only human beings decide that certain traits are undesirable and others worthy of praise.
Thomas Hobbes, meanwhile, reminds us that community can only function when individuals surrender part of their freedom. Without rules, we face the famous bellum omnium contra omnes—the war of all against all. The inhabitants of Gubbio probably had little interest in being eaten while discussing philosophy.
Both positions are right. That is precisely why there is no simple answer.
Of course communities need rules. Of course they need boundaries. Of course nobody can live entirely according to immediate impulses. The real question is where necessary adaptation ends and the denial of one’s own nature begins.
The matter becomes even more complicated because rules possess a remarkable characteristic: they often outlive the reasons for which they were created.
There is a frequently told parable about a group of monkeys living in an enclosure. At the top of a pyramid hang several bananas. Whenever a monkey attempts to climb the pyramid and reach the bananas, the entire group is drenched with freezing cold water. Eventually the monkeys learn to avoid the climb. The connection is obvious: whoever reaches for the bananas causes suffering for everyone.
Then one monkey is replaced. The newcomer has never experienced the cold shower. Naturally, it immediately attempts to climb toward the bananas. Before it gets very far, the other monkeys attack it and prevent it from continuing. Not out of malice, but because they have learned that such behaviour brings unpleasant consequences.
Gradually, all of the original monkeys are replaced. Eventually not a single monkey remains who has ever experienced the cold water. Yet every newcomer is still attacked whenever it tries to climb the pyramid. The community itself has taken over the role of punishment. The rule survives even though nobody remembers why it exists. None of the monkeys knows why the bananas are forbidden. They only know that anyone trying to reach them must be stopped.
Whether the experiment ever happened exactly this way is ultimately beside the point. As a parable, it describes something human beings understand all too well. Rules are often created for sensible reasons. Yet rules have a remarkable tendency to outlive those reasons. A necessary measure becomes a habit. A habit becomes a tradition. A tradition becomes common sense. Eventually nobody asks why a rule exists. It is simply defended.
Perhaps this happens more often than we would like to admit. Not every demand placed upon us genuinely serves the protection of the community. Some expectations survive merely because they have always existed. Some norms continue to be enforced long after nobody can explain why. The cold shower has vanished. The guardians of the rule remain.
It was precisely at this point that the idea for the series emerged.
These images therefore do not tell the story of Saint Francis. They tell the story of the wolf. They do not depict the redemption of the wild. They depict perception, judgment, resistance, and retreat. They show the path of a being increasingly confronted by expectations.
The circle of light that runs through the series became a symbol of the forces every human being knows: social expectations, religious concepts, moral demands, traditions, and norms. Some of these are necessary. Some genuinely protect the community. Others persist merely because nobody asks whether they are still needed.
Perhaps that is the question that fascinates me most about this legend. Not whether Francis was right. Not whether the wolf was right.
But whether we ourselves can still distinguish between the adaptations that are necessary and those that survive only because they have become habit.
The series offers no answer. It merely attempts to shift the perspective. Away from the question of how the wolf was tamed, and toward another question:
What does that actually do to the wolf?