Virxilio Viéitez

Virxilio Viéitez (Soutelo de Montes, 1930 – 2008)

He was born in the municipality of Soutelo de Montes (Pontevedra) on October 23, 1930, and passed away in the same town in 2008.

Career

He began working as a photographer on the Costa Brava, taking portraits of tourists. In 1955, he returned to Galicia and opened a photography studio in his hometown. This allowed him to portray many generations of neighbors from the Terra de Montes area, almost anonymously, yet always with a deeply humanist gaze.
His photographs depict individuals and groups at social events such as communions, wakes, and baptisms, as well as in everyday life. Regarding his technique, most of his works are in black and white, although he experimented with color photography during the 1970s.
In the 1980s, he stepped away from photography. In the 1990s, his work was rediscovered and came to represent the excellence of Galician photography at the 8th Vigo Photobiennial in 1998. Viéitez’s work was also featured in landmark exhibitions such as 150 Years of Photography in Spain and Al gust de Cartier-Bresson, presented in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and New York. His major recognition came with the retrospective Virxilio Viéitez at the MARCO Museum in Vigo, later shown at the Fundación Telefónica Space and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando under the title El tiempo detenido (“Time Stopped”), cementing his legacy as one of the great visual chroniclers of Galicia’s collective memory.