Camera Obscura

Abelardo Morell, author of last year's award-winning A Book of Books, makes enchanting camera obscura images in darkened interiors. The deceptively simple process--he blacks out all of 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.

Abelardo Morell's magical camera obscura images blur the boundaries between interior and exterior worlds.

Abelardo Morell, author of last year's award-winning A Book of Books, makes enchanting camera obscura images in darkened interiors. The deceptively simple process--he blacks out all of 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.

Abelardo Morell has been exhibited and collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and over forty other museums and institutions worldwide. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Luc Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and a short study of Walker Evans. He has written on photography for many publications and has contributed prefaces to works by diverse photographers, including Guy Bourdin, James Nachtwey, Todd Hido, and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. He teaches writing and the history of Photography at Bard College.