Introduction

Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura images are created by the age-old optical principle of darkening a room and projecting an inverted image of the world outside through a small aperture. Morell photographically records ephemeral, upside-down images of the outside world by placing his four-by-five view camera in rooms and opening the shutter for time exposures lasting typically as long as eight hours.

Morell’s photographic records seem intended to enact and explain the mysterious optical principles of the camera obscura; surely no other artist’s work demonstrates more literally the visual properties of the camera obscura. Morell wants to make pictures of how the camera sees. While photographs are framed, static slices of time, the camera obscura—a precursor of photography—was thought to trace the undifferentiated and undemarcated images of the outside world that continually surround us in real time. That we are enveloped by a plurality of images is an idea that informs the work of Morell. Morell’s work proposes that both the “natural” images of the world and our representations of it fluidly transport themselves in our perception and consciousness. His camera obscura images, as well as his depictions of books, scrapbooks and historical artwork, also suggest that the images around us are as enduring as time. His subjects, which include city landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chrysler Building and the Eiffel Tower, have in a sense cast their dominant images in adjacent buildings and neighborhoods as long as they have existed. Likewise, in Two Books of Astronomy (1996)—juxtaposed images of a star field and of an early astronomer seeming to gaze through his objective telescope at the stars above—we may reflect that stars have cast their unchanging image without pause, long before the existence of humankind or our thought to record the light of the universe.

Morell also experiments with the transposition of historic images. In Book: Portrait of Da Vinci and School of Da Vinci (1993), the photographer approximates the simultaneous perception of two portraits—two versions, two realities. Isabella with Tapestry (1998) conjures the hovering image of Isabella Stuart Gardner on a tapestry that hangs in one of her sitting rooms in the Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. Two Paintings Sharing an Archway (1998), also from the Gardner Museum, conjoins two disparate images that nonetheless seem to share the respective halves of an archway in common. The characters and even the narrative of each seem poised to migrate into the other. Morell’s recording and melding of images is a postmodern reminder of the constancy of the images that surround us.