Nature in Virxilio Vieitez's photography

The present essay suggests an approach to the archive of Galician rural photographer Virxilio Vieitez (1930-2008) from the theoretical view of ecocriticism, with the aim of delve into the role of nature in his photographs. The analysis is organized in three points; the first, representation of landscape, poses a characterization of the unit landscape of the region in which the photographer performed his work, Terra de Montes (Pontevedra), and studies the role that humans play in it. The second, animals, offers a proposal of classification for the species that appear in the archive according to their relation to human being and introduces the notion of "change", essential in the third point, the image of the rural, which defines the vision of the village the archive gives and its chronological variations. In the conclusion the previous points are brought to the current reality of rural Galicia with the objective of inspiring a response from rural activism to the process of "urban colonization" of the rural area that is demonstrated throughout the work.