UPSIDE DOWN INSIDE OUT BEAUTY: ABELARDO MORELL

Born in Cuba, in 1948, Morell developed an early interest in early photographic technology. He loves to experiment with these old photographic techniques, adapting them to create contemporary constructs that flip perceptions upside down, inside out, turning space into art and the world around him into his medium.

Morell’s most iconic works, his Camera Obscura photo series, layer landscapes inside interior spaces.

Camera obscura (“darkened room,” in Latin) is fundamentally one of the oldest, most primitive ways to make an image. It is made by shining a thin ray of light through a narrow hole into a dark room, which casts an upside-down image onto opposing walls. The room becomes the “body” of the “camera.” Dutch Master painter Vermeer used camera obscura as a painting tool long before photography was invented.

In the mid-80’s, when Morell was first teaching photography at the Massachusetts College of Art, he turned his classrooms into camera obscuras, by blacking out the windows with plastic and duct tape, then cutting a tiny hole in the plastic and inserting a lens.

While at first blush, his Camera Obscura images look as though they are created using double exposure techniques, as if two separate images are layered, one on top of the other, they are actually each single compositions.

When the light passed through Morell’s lens, projecting the room’s exterior against the opposing wall, Morell stepped back and photographed the entire scene, seamlessly integrating interior and exterior, creating a surreal space-warp. No one had ever done that before. He has continued his Camera Obscura series over many years in a variety of locations around the world.

We see giant downtown Manhattan skyscrapers projected onto the walls and furniture of a modest apartment interior, we see the Brooklyn Bridge and the treetops of Central Park, each projected into nearby bedrooms. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower is projected onto the wall inside the Hotel Frantour.  In Venice, the Piazzetta San Marco is projected into an austere office and the Santa Maria della Salute church is projected onto ornate insides of a lush Baroque palazzo. 

Morell’s layered images present both visual and conceptual complexity. Just as paper and mixed media collages do, Morell’s photos layer color and texture, but their key is layered light. They are dreamlike, evoking surreal, diaphanous states of consciousness. They exemplify what Morell says is “photography’s power is to make even dreams seem quite concrete.” 

Morell’s images have a painterly quality. One series, entitled “After Monet,” captures tent camera obscura images in Normandy, in places where the painter lived and worked, from Girverney in the gardens, to Rouen at the cathedrals, to the coastal town of Étretat.

The “Flowers for Lisa” series began in 2014, when Morell made a photograph of flowers for his wife's birthday.  Morell continued to photograph flowers for Lisa, both as gifts to her, and as challenges to himself. Given that flowers are a common subject of photos and paintings, Morell was tasked with  representing flowers in unique and inventive ways.

Inspired by Jan Brueghel, Giorgio Morandi, Édouard Manet, Georgia O'Keeffe, Irving Penn and Joan Mitchell, he experimented with a range of techniques utilized by painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers, to create a new multi-layered narrative. “While the subject of my work may be flowers, the photographs are also pictures about perspective, love, jealousy, hate, geometry, sex, life, the passage of time, and death,” says Morell.

Morell holds an MFA from Yale University and an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the International Center of Photography Infinity Award, and other prestigious honors. His work is in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fondation Cartier, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and more than seventy other museums around the world.

Check out Morell’s “Flowers for Lisa: A Delirium of Photographic Invention” as well as his earlier books, A Book of Books, Camera Obscura, and The Universe Next Door. Also see “Shadow of the House,” an in-depth documentary about Morell’s work and experience as an artist, directed by Allie Humenuk.  

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