Camera Obscura

Abelardo Morell, author of last year's award-winning A Book of Books, makes magical 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. 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.