ABELARDO MORELL

Monographs

Publications including Morell's Work

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Photographs by Abelardo Morell
Introduction by Luc Sante

Bulfinch Press, New York
2004

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Camera Obscura

"The camera obscura seems little short of miraculous, even after the optical rationale has been explained... That Abelardo Morell was able to photograph the thing in action, in effect producing photographs of a photographic process, and that he has done so with such lapidar and transformative eloquence, is breathtaking."

Luc Sante, from the Introduction
Download the complete introduction
by Luc Sante (PDF; 5.35mb)
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by Abelardo Morell (PDF; 4.1mb)

"Morell is a virtuoso of the camera obscura."

Mark Singer, The New Yorker

"Abe Morell turns ordinary rooms into camera obscuras, making eight-hour exposures of upside-down views of the outside world cast across their varied surfaces--not just walls and floors, but furniture, appliances, and other appurtenances of domestic life. The resulting images feel more like a dream than the most fanciful digital composite. New York's Empire State Building shoots down a wall, then turns at a right angle onto a bedspread; the inverted Grand Tetons wainscot a Jackson Hole hotel room decorated with a poster of Ansel Adams's famous view of the nearby Snake River. Morell's work is about the miracle of photography itself."

R.H., "The Best Photo Books of the Year," American Photo

"As the world of photography grows ever more digitized, Morell offers a glorious and surprising reminder of its classical roots. The well-known Cuban-born photographer essentially turns a room into the interior of a camera. He blacks out the windows, leaving a pinhole opening in one of them. Because of the nature of refracted light, the scene outside the window is projected upside down into the dim room. Morell then captures the room on film with a large-format view camera; exposures can take eight hours or more. The juxtapositions in the book's 60 duotones are eerily beautiful: New England clapboard houses hang serenely on the walls of a child's bedroom strewn with toy dinosaurs; Times Square throws a patchwork over the walls and bed of a Manhattan hotel room; the cityscape of Havana spreads across the crumbling interior wall of an apartment."

Editors of Scientific American

"It sounds like a gimmick: Photographer Abelardo Morell turns whole rooms into box cameras. The upside-down image appears on the wall opposite the pinhole. He then photographs that image. Streetscapes and forests cover beds, walls, tables and chairs. The results are as specific and haunting as the best dreams."

"Best Holiday Gifts," Newsweek