Mezcal: Ancestral Fire
Roland Hartley | Oaxaca, Mexico
Photographer: Roland Hartley
Exhibit Title: Mezcal: Ancestral Fire
Location: Oaxaca, Mexico
In Santa Catarina Minas, a village in Oaxaca’s agave country, mezcal is still made close to the earth. At Palenque El Conejo, wood fires burn beneath clay pots; smoke rises from a rock pit oven cut into the ground. Each year on St. Valentine’s Day, neighbors gather with flowers and candles to bless the harvest to come. At the center of the altar sits El Niño, a bejeweled doll. The ritual is simple, local, ancient.
As night falls, frankincense drifts through the shed. A young brujo kneels before the candles and leads prayers and songs shaped by generations of belief and labor. What follows is not ceremony set apart from work, but woven into the same continuum: agave roasted for days, piñas crushed by hand, mezcal distilled in clay pots over open flames.
At Palenque El Conejo “ancestral” is not branding. It marks a way of making that has endured despite industrial pressure and cultural erosion. Maestro mezcalero Antonio Carlos Martínez and his sons carry that knowledge forward, keeping alive a practice shaped by land, family, and time.
From an early age I relied on paper maps, compasses, and dead reckoning to navigate forests and the sea. That way of seeing—finding direction in topography and wind—formed the basis of how I understand the world. During my university years, I became increasingly interested in the relationship between geography and the rise of civilizations. This curiosity led me into commodity trading, a field built on removing the physical barriers between where things are grown or made and where they are needed. That work took me to remote parts of the world, far from tourist routes, where I could observe how rivers, mountains, soil, and trade routes govern patterns of settlement, agriculture, and industry.
These experiences continue to anchor my photography. I am drawn to places where history is written in the land itself, and equally to those where people have held fast against the tide of forgetting — where ancient ways of belonging, making, and mourning persist not as relics but as living acts of will. I make images to uncover the hidden geographies that shape how we build, remember, belong, and live on the land.
Roland Hartley is an emerging photo-based artist and alternative-process image-maker working in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where he also raises grass-fed Piedmontese cattle. Roland studied at the International Center of Photography (ICP), and his platinum-palladium prints have been included in a number of group exhibitions and publications beginning in 2025.
Most recently, Roland was awarded the 2025 John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship by the Griffin Museum of Photography, with a solo exhibition scheduled for December 2026.
Make Comment/View Comments
