“Today time didn’t seem to go so slow,” Mari Carmen once told the photographer Adra Pallón. He had spent the morning at her home, following her in the kitchen as she cooked, exchanging stories. It was a small observation but its effect on Pallón was large. A seemingly simple shared experience caused the day to feel different—a testament to Pallón’s dedication to the story of his homeland of Galicia.
Pallón’s new publication, Lumes, opens with a pair of hands, wrinkled and rough, with dirt under the fingernails, crossed in repose. The project is a study in rich blues and blacks. An illuminance of oranges and reds. A study of older faces and bodies. Ghostly trees and smoke. With hauntingly beautiful images, Pallon tells the story of a land, a culture, and a people beset by multiple interconnected threats, from the emptying of villages to the specter of ever more frequent forest fires.
‘Lumes,’ the project’s title, is a Galician word. “It means fire; it is a term that reflects duality. On the one hand, lumes is the word used to refer to the homes inhabited in the countryside, where fire symbolized life, warmed the home, and around which the community and the family gathered,” Pallón explains. “On the other hand, lumes also refers to the forest fires that devastate our territory and cultural heritage annually. Fire is now associated with destruction as it has moved to the forests due to the rural exodus and the abandonment of the environment—an environment that is losing its native forest and the traditional territorial structure of farmland.”
Galicia, an autonomous community in the northwest of Spain, faces a multi-pronged crisis, each tendril of change exacerbating the gloomy outlook of the bigger picture. There are close to 4,000 abandoned villages in the region. In Pallón’s photographs, we see the weathered, mostly older, faces of people who have worked the land for decades. Their numbers are dwindling as young people leave and the countryside dramatically changes under the pressures of big industry; economical shifts that have devastating ecological ramifications.
Since the mid-1990s, large-scale forest fires have plagued Galicia. The rampant spread of non-native trees, in particular eucalyptus, has delivered a catastrophic blow to the region. By 2023, eucalyptus accounted for 28% of tree stock in the region’s forests, feeding paper and lumber industries whilst sparking terrifying forest fires. Eucalyptus can be planted and cut for resources within 15 years, dwarfing the timeline of native oaks and chestnuts, turning profits far faster than other species. But the tree is a pyrophyte species, meaning it needs fire to reproduce and survive. Highly flammable, when planted in windy terrain the trees act as a tinderbox.
In a recent article, researchers at Madrid’s Comillas Pontifical University found that “the progressive abandonment of rural areas is one of the most important problems that increases the occurrence of wildfires.” As more villages are emptied, the questions abound, who will remain to steward the land, to continue on the culture? When industries grow without proper management who bears the brunt of this lack of responsibility? Who benefits when the original inhabitants and their way of life disappear or are starved of resources?
These issues fuel each other—breaking a connection to the land can break a connection to culture and vice versa. During the Franco dictatorship, Galicia experienced wide-ranging repression of its language. The countryside resisted, preserving other cultural traditions alongside its precious language. Now these traditions face another wave of dissolution, slipping away as small villages are abandoned.
Throughout the project, Pallón’s connection, understanding, and devotion to his subject matter shine through. “I am not a well-traveled photographer. If I can be in my homeland and photograph a few kilometers away from home, all the better. Because for me having the same cultural codes is important to create images,” he observes.
The color rhymes and rhythms of his home region have even shaped the design of the book itself. Pallón has structured the story as a journey through seasons, from autumn to summer. This decision comes from O gaiteiro de Lugo, a book found in many Galician’s homes over the years. It features lunar calendars, agricultural information, and short stories all in Galician. “When we started working on the materialization of the Lumes project, it was fundamental for us to create an object that resonated with the experiences of the farmers from whom we all descend,” he explains.
The color palette of Lumes is Galician too, influenced by the clouds, rain, and cold light. “The feeling captured in Lumes has no hope because it is a way of life that comes to an end. Sometimes I wish it had more light.” The photographs bear a striking resemblance to Old Masters, for the depth of their color, but perhaps even more so for the feeling of a lost world that they capture. People sit hunched over a meal with a fire emerging from the darkness or perform chores in the early morning light. The silky hides of cows in a barn glow. All these scenes could be pulled from 19th century tableaux.
Lumes’ narrative ebbs and flows, pulling in quiet moments such as a line of trees bathed in fog and snow in a cemetery, then incorporating more active ones; men harvesting grapes, caring for animals, and the ominous sooty orange skies of a blazing fire. The protagonists of the story are those like his own grandmother, who do not want to leave their land, even when conditions become more difficult and outside forces apply mounting pressure. The book is a tribute to them.
And so it is fitting that Lumes concludes with several lines in Galician from the poet Uxío Novoneyra, which roughly translate to:
“WHERE there’s only somebody left to hold the names
I put the broad foliage
the circle of chestnut trees
and sitting by its shade by the whole lineage of the last farmworker.”
“The ones that hold the names” in Novoneyra’s text could also be the people in Pallón’s photographs. “To hold the names of the villages is a metaphor for holding on to all that millenary culture that unfortunately is being lost,” the photographer explains. “Novoneyra fought and wrote the history of our people through his poetry. My purpose was related to that—to try to pay tribute to all our people who struggle to stay in our land.”
Hope is often an act of defiance, no matter the difficulty. Pallón has called his work “a cry of homage and rage.” Lumes is a tribute as much as it is an act of preservation, a battle cry, and a gesture of hope.
ISBN: 978-84-126695-6-5
Adra Pallón was one of 25 photographers discovered via LensCulture Emerging Talents Award 2023. You can see all of the winners here, And if you are an emerging photographer, consider submitting your work now for the Emerging Talent Awards 2024.
