Collection Online as of December 4, 2023
Camera Obscura Image of Houses across the Street in Our Bedroom
Abelardo Morell
(American, 1948-)
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Linda Butler and Steven Nissen and Judith K. and Sterling McMillan III 1994.205
Impression: 15
Location
not on view
Description
Abelardo Morell's modern-day use of the camera obscura fuses the ordinary with the imaginary. Alluding to the drawing devices used by artists since the Renaissance to project and copy nature onto paper, his images exemplify the very essence of photography—the focused passage of light through an aperture into a sealed space. Morell finds ordinary rooms and turns them into cameras. Taping black plastic over all the windows, he leaves one 3/8-inch hole, which provides light for the image. He then sets up his large-format camera on a tripod inside the room, focuses his lens on the wall opposite the hole, stops down for maximum depth of field, opens the shutter, and leaves the room. Using eight-hour exposures, he produces simple, elegant demonstrations of camera optics. Morrell's surreal juxtapositions of the inner and outer world combine to create playful yet mysterious scenes of domestic and urban life.
Abelardo Morell
Abelardo Morell American, b. Cuba, 1948- Havana-born Abe Morell became interested in photography while a student of John McKee at Bowdoin College in Maine (B.A., 1977). Fascinated by the surreal, he initially produced manipulated prints of outlandish scenarios. The work of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, however, showed Morell "that straight photography could pack more surrealism into a picture" than he could achieve through manipulation. Adopting a 35mm straight technique, in 1978 he traveled to Miami and New York to work as a street photographer in the vein of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, continuing in this format at Yale University (M.F.A., 1981). In the late 1980s, Morell began two series for which he is best known: large-scale black-and-white photographs of interior spaces made with a self-built camera obscura, and still lifes of pictures of the pictures in books. The images provide clever post-modern commentary on the nature of photographic representation by referencing the medium's beginnings while simultaneously celebrating the ephemeral magic of light and shadow. Devoid of human subjects, these psychologically complex interior landscapes allude to the changing spheres of childhood and family, and our understanding of history itself, in contemporary middle-class society. Morell has received fellowships from the Cintas Foundation (1992-93) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1993-94). He currently chairs the photography department at Massachusetts College of Art and lives in Quincy. A.W.