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“They used to be everywhere — even outside the peak season,” someone told me, eyes lit up as they looked at my photos. I had shown the local residents of Boiçuganga a picture of fireflies. They told me how as children, fireflies were just part of the night. Ordinary magic. Now, they had almost forgotten that they ever existed. They went on to describe how easy it was to catch fireflies and then keep them in a glass bowl to light up their rooms at night.
That moment felt larger than nostalgia. It struck me how effortlessly we can forget the lights that once stirred something within us — not only the literal lights, but the small glimmers of awe, of care, of presence, the quiet constellations we believed would always shine.
But I hadn’t come to the forest in search of fireflies. I came for the forest itself — to sink into the primordial darkness of the Atlantic Rainforest, a darkness that awakens senses beyond sight. I wanted to capture that shift. The slow deepening of the landscape, the way night rearranges what we feel and what we know. Yet there is no camera of my awareness that can capture the scent of damp earth, the shiver on the skin, or the heightened awareness of sound that my body carried. So, in time, I set the camera aside and invited others to walk with me — to enter the forest unmediated, and let the night speak for itself.
We began at dusk, without flashlights. Step by step, we moved into the forest. The light faded behind us until it was gone completely. And with every movement, the body grew more alert. Every branch, breath, footstep began to matter. We leaned into one another, becoming a single, attentive presence. And then, a flicker, and another.
Fireflies shimmered against the dark forest, then faded, retreating into its deeper reaches. Where they’re surviving beyond the spotlight of human attention, in the quiet folds of night we no longer enter.
The encounter with the fireflies brought to mind the words of philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, thinking of the fireflies as symbols of resistance: “The little fireflies give form and glimmer to our fragile immanence; the “fierce spotlights” of the great light devour all form and all glimmer—all difference—in the transcendence of the final ends.” For him, fireflies stand as quiet defiance against the blinding lights of spectacle and control.
In his book Survival of the Fireflies, Didi-Huberman responds to filmmaker Pasolini, who mourned the disappearance of the fireflies in Italy as a metaphor for the fading of a more innocent, freer way of life — one that was slowly being extinguished under the growing weight of authoritarian power.
Reading this today, it’s hard not to think of how those “fierce spotlights” have returned — in different guises, but with familiar force. The rise of fascist ideologies, surveillance states, and populist spectacles feeds on visibility and control, leaving little space for nuance, for the quiet in which fireflies appear.
That night, I captured the faint signals of real fireflies — but not in abundance, not like the vibrant images of Samuel James, where the bioluminescent glow in the foothills of Appalachian Ohio seems to rise from the pages of his book Nightairs. My own photographs feel shy, more in tune with Pasolini’s metaphor of mourning.
Yet they remind me that even the faintest light can awaken a glimmer in someone’s eyes, carrying back a memory almost lost to time. I hope that future generations will once again light their rooms with the resistant glow of fireflies — because in darkness, I believe we remember what is worth protecting, and why even the smallest glimmer matters.
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