On the beach at Alagôa a lone photographer, Gill Campbell, captured the ominous onset of an autumn storm. The immaculately reproduced image is on display at Galeria Côrte-Real in Paderne.
Moving on from a career in the turbulent world of cat-walk fashion shows, designer labels and global advertising campaigns, Gill Campbell – in her words – “lives half way up a mountain in the eastern Algarve”.
Nowadays better recognised as a landscape photographer, her current surroundings are in marked contrast to a studio in a wharf-side warehouse in London’s edgy Docklands. With a degree in Fashion and Textiles, she became a location and props finder and later the first female photographer for the style-setting Blitz magazine.
Visually as sharp as her camera-lens, the image of Alagôa beach is mesmerising, picturing the calm before the storm.
“Just before the storm erupted, everything went quiet,” she explains. “The air seemed still and a grey eerie sky engulfed the horizon.”
“Gill was there at the critical moment,” says Pedro Côrte-Real, co-owner of the gallery. “The image, which has been reproduced by the Fine Art Giclée process, pictures an Algarve beach under a most unusual sky. The rare lighting conditions enhance the overall appearance.”
Not all storms are preceded by this kind of peaceful scenario but when fuelled with warm, moist air that is pulled into the storm system a vacuum is created. Varying in their strength and destructive power, the storm that hit the Algarve on January 6 2014 caused extensive damage to beaches, breakwaters and business premises near the shoreline.
Such storms are influenced by a weather phenomenon known as the Atlantic oscillation. Similar to El Niño and its effects on the Pacific climate, the Atlantic oscillation is caused by differences in atmospheric pressures far out at sea. Fluctuations between the Azores high and the Icelandic low, control wind and storm tracks across the North Atlantic.
Photographs and paintings of rough seas are commonplace whereas Gill’s image captures a more unique and short-lived moment just as the storm began to move inland.
Visit Côrte- Real’s new Pop-Up Gallery located above the estate agents ‘Fine and Country,’ close to the beach in the centre of Carvoeiro, Rua do Barranco.
The main gallery ‘Galeria Côrte-Real’ is signposted from Boliqueime, Ferreiras and Paderne. Open Thursday to Sunday, from 11am until 5pm.
912 737 762 | www.corterealarte.com
By Carolyn Kain
