ARTISTADAY Selection –Abelardo Morell
I was looking through the photographs on ARTISTADAY for work that looked like it came from a camera rather than Adobe’s Photoshop. These pictures from Abelardo Morell were made with a camera obscura. This is a technique that goes back centuries and is often associated with Renaissance artists. (Vermeer is said to have used it.) While you can find lists of all the known camera obscura in the world on the internet, Morell can turn an ordinary room into camera obscura very easily. Here are two examples of his photography and included below is the background information from the ARTISTADAY website.
Abelardo MorellAbelardo Morell’s photographs remind us that photography is more about how we see than the tools we use to create it. As we become ensconced with computer technology, more and more artists are returning to the past, working with processes and instruments more than one hundred years old. Morell is one of those artists who burst onto the scene with a series of images made with a camera obscura — a lensless camera most often associated with Renaissance artists.
Morell takes an ordinary room – his living room, his son’s bedroom, a hotel room — and transforms it into a camera by placing black plastic over all of the windows, leaving a 3/8″ hole through which the light passes. He then sets up his view camera in the room, points it at the opposite wall, opens the lens and lets the image appear on the film over the next eight hours. The result of his endeavor is a magical world which fuses outdoor elements with domestic scenes, allowing the viewer to see the existing reality outside the window. Morell has transformed many rooms into cameras, recording the Empire State Building inside a bedroom, Times Square onto the sterile walls of a Marriott hotel room, and a view of Brookline onto the walls and ceiling of his son’s bedroom, as trees and buildings interact with toy dinosaurs. These are extraordinary images alter our perception of reality and our placement in it.
source: EdelmanGallery.com
The most interesting part about these images is at a quick glance from afar they look like unedited black and white photographs, but as you stare at the walls you start to notice that another photo blended in and inverted. I also noticed that in both photos that a landscape from outside is brought into the photograph of the bedroom that was taken inside. This is amazing work!
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