About the author

about the Author

My name is Javier Regueira (El Ferrol, 1971) and I am amateur photographer whose main photographic interest is focused on landscape and seascape photography. Based in Vigo (Pontevedra, Spain), I travel through Galician landscapes in the northwest of Spain in the search of new scenarios that transmit a story to the viewer.

I am enthusiast of light, color and shapes, and my photographic work leaves aside the human component in them. It is usual that in my photography (of landscape theme, but also of architecture or fine-art) the absence of human beings predominates, or at least in a main role, being relegated, in those cases in what they do appear, to a merely aesthetic role (as a compositional resource), or even conceptual (as can be seen in my series Beyond Focus).

Light and color dominate everything in my photographs, even when the light is absent or is subtle, a small ray, a point of light or a small clarity becomes indispensable protagonists of the image.

my photographic work

The world is shown in front of my camera, and sometimes it is exhibited with picardy and intimacy, but other times with power and forcefulness. And I want to reflect that duality in my work, the duality of that the most mundane scenarios are sometimes the most majestic.

My work has no documentary interest. It does not make the search of an extreme fidelity to the photographic subject. Often, the creators imagine their works interpreting reality in their mind. I use this perspective in my work. Each photographed image has been previously presented in front of my eyes, and it has been that way, when I have imagined that photograph as an interpretation of the past scene. Each image of my work is an interpretation of the light and color there was at the time of the shot, but passed by my ideals (and even memories) at the time of the development. My images neither take away anything of the scene, nor add anything that was not there, but they do enhance and highlight those subjects, those lights and shadows, and those colors which were latent in the shot, hidden for the inexperienced eye, and waiting to be revealed to the viewer.

My work reflects the interpretation of the image that I make, which can be colorful, luminous, or directly the opposite, but always it's faithful in concept to the exposed reality.

main photographic themes

landscapes and seascapes

The search for a location with soul centers my landscape photographic work. Not a grandiose or spectacular landscape, but a daily and closer landscape, the type of landscape that normally we all have on our side, but that most people do not see. It's this paradox that I seek to reflect in my images: we are surrounded by beauty that becomes hidden from our eyes because we do not look attentively. Any scene can be majestic if you look properly and take care of the small effects that light produces in all things.

My landscapes and seascapes images are mostly located close to my homeland, but they look for amaze us with a way of looking at things, a way of understanding the world, and a way of letting light penetrate our eyes . They are not spectacular because of a series of geographical events, but they have the character of the land to which they belong, and their majesty comes from the way in which they are shown to the viewer.

light, color and shapes above definition

This series explores the thesis that things maintain their essence even once their particularity and definition disappear. In this way, a scene in which various human figures intervene does not lose its message even if the details of those figures disappear.

Thus, I adopt the photographic technique of focusing much beyond the focus point of the subjects, allowing, not only that these subjects lose their sharpness in the image, but completely erasing their features, deforming their forms, and fully veiling the backgrounds and scenes in which the scenes take place, allowing the scene to maintain its meaning through the shapes and colors that are maintained.

Somehow, I want the viewer to complete the work at the moment of its vision. As normally the artistic proposals convey the vision of the author, in this case I seek that the viewer participates in the creative process, proposing a frame of reference of objects, characters and scenarios, which have to be completed at the time of viewing to give an own story to the scene. The path I undertook in this series seeks to simplify the forms to a minimalist conception and devoid of details, but retaining the significance of the scene. The paradox is that even if the scene does not change, the viewer can put the faces and details he wants in each one, completely dehumanizing the human forms that participate in the images, to the point where they can be replaced by any other without the proposed scene change.

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