CAMERA OBSCURA
Abelardo Morell

Hardbound , 12" x 11", 112 pages
60 duotone illustrations
2004, Bulfinch
Text by Luc Sante

From the Publisher:
Abelardo Morell makes enchanting camera obscura images in darkened interiors. The deceptively simple process—he blacks out the windows, leaving just a pinhole opening in one of them—produces photographs of astonishing, complex beauty. Due to the nature of refracted light, the world outside his darkened room is projected, upside down, onto the interior space within which he works, converting the room, in effect, into the interior of a camera. Morell then photographs the results with a large-format view camera, often requiring exposures of eight hours or more.

Locations around the world were chosen for the interesting details and juxtapositions they would elicit: the Empire State Building lies across a bedspread in a midtown Manhattan interior; the Tower of London is imprinted on the walls of a room in the Tower Hotel; the countryside in rural Cuba, Morell’s birthplace, plays across the walls of a crumbling interior that is rich with the patina of its own history. Every image is full of surprises and revelations.

About the Author:
Abelardo Morell’s work has been exhibited and collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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