A German medical engineer, retired and winter resident in Maspalomas since 2017, exhibits at the Casa de Saturninita 15 select photographs of the tourist landscape of the south of Gran Canaria, captured in 'the blue hour, the temporal sequence where the late twilight merges with the night offering a unique light show
The renowned German photographer Reiner Vogels exhibits at the Casa de Saturninita Municipal Art Center a select sample of the work he is doing for his bibliographic project 'the blue hour', dedicated to immortalizing the twilight light landscape of the most emblematic tourist infrastructures in the South from Gran Canaria.
The exhibition, open to the public throughout the month of February, was inaugurated this Thursday by the second deputy mayor and councilor responsible for the area of Education and Culture, Elena Álamo Vega, who highlighted “the importance of giving visibility to the work of the artists of different nationalities in a tourist and intercultural municipality like San Bartolomé de Tirajana.” The event took place in an expectant and unusual atmosphere due to the attendance of numerous members of the German community residing in the municipality, who decided to accompany their compatriot encouraged by the Viva Canarias magazine, their reference information magazine.
Reiner Vogels de Siegen (Oberhausen, February 16, 1995), who was a medical engineer by profession, has been visiting Gran Canaria as a vacation spot since 1987. Since he retired seven years ago, he has resided permanently in Maspalomas for five or six months a year. , from November to March or April. In addition to photography, his other great passion is playing tennis, in fact he competes in the international senior circuit for those over 60 years of age.
The exhibition offered at Casa Saturninita, with 15 medium and large format photos, is an important sample of the iconographic work that is being carried out - with unusual patience and Spartan method - on the panoramic landscapes of the tourist and urban infrastructures of Gran Canaria. She wants to collect them in a documentary and monumental book, as she has already done in Germany.
The small photographic exhibition carried out at Casa Saturninita is expressly dedicated to different tourist environments and panoramic views of San Bartolomé de Tirajana and Mogán, specifically related to the Faro and Villa del Conde hotels, the Maspalomas Lighthouse, Amadores Beach, the Port of Mogán, Anfi del Mar, Meloneras and, as an experimental outpost, also the bay of Las Palmas.
Reiner Vogels' photographic landscapes, all panoramic and nocturnal in nature, are a mirror of recognizable spatial natures in which no human being appears. They are the light, the clarity, the brilliance of the colors, the time stopped in the atmosphere and the monumentality of the spaces... that give life and dynamism to his works and, in turn, to the infrastructures reflected in them. .
And to achieve this, the creative process of each work requires the author to take many individual photos (sometimes up to 200) with different exposure times, from the same point of view and with a tripod, and then, after selecting the sequence, process them. digitally in layers and all together, using an image editing program.
Vogels is interested in extracting and showing extremely the transparent and clear luminescent effects that occur in the temporal contrast that occurs in the blue hour, which is the space of between 30 and 40 minutes in which the evening light melts and confuses with the darkness of the night.
Before photographing the panoramic spaces that you are interested in immortalizing, you visit them again and again until you find the most ideal elevated place from which to focus and shoot without rushing. “My biggest goal is to make the shots natural, as the human eye would perceive them at night,” she says.
With that same perspective he has photographed in Germany, Australia, Dubai, Cuba and the United States for assignments from magazines, tour operators and hotels.
