Word: obscura
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Morell's best-known series of photographs is based on the camera obscura (Latin for "dark room"). When a room is completely sealed against light except for a tiny hole, an inverted image of the world outside is projected onto the opposite wall. The pinhole camera works on this same principle of optics. Morell seals off the rooms of houses and hotels to make them into camera obscuras, and then sets up his camera inside the room, so as to capture the projected image, distorted by the furnishings of the chosen room, over the course of a long exposure...
Abelardo Morell and the Camera Eye, on view at the MFA through April 11, is the first major traveling exhibition of this contemporary photographer's work. Morell, born 1948 in Cuba, has concentrated for the past decade on several projects besides his camera obscura series; his domestic still lifes, his explorations of books, maps and paintings and his illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are also presented. All his photographs are large-format silver gelatin prints. His photographic technique is traditional, but he is nimbly inventive in his manipulation of the objects he chooses to photograph...
...camera obscura series enchants with the sheer oddness of the resulting images, of skyscrapers bending at the angle where wall joins ceiling and three-deckers turned upside-down. Visual puns--like the Empire State Building, reclining suggestively across a hotel bed--sharpen the images. The very long exposures Morell used for these make for curious effects, such as the atomic radiance of the digital alarm clock in "Camera obscura image of Times Square in hotel room...
...gallery's entrance, grayscale clapboard houses cascade behind the dimpled shadows of a rumpled bed. The result is spellbinding. Forget the brainless integration of disparate images accessible to anyone with Adobe Photoshop; Morell wields a technique known since the time of Plato (think the Cave Allegory): the camera obscura, in which a single aperture allows for the projection of outside images onto the walls of a darkened room. It is comforting to note, as Morell's students reputedly do, "that something this low tech could be so magical...
James Casebere's surreal photographs of plaster models and catacomb-like spaces display the camera obscura method in a markedly different manner. For Casebere, his studio becomes a metaphorical representation of the pinhole camera; his eerie black and white prints, though smaller and less enchanting than Morell's work, beguile the viewer. In "Toilets," a dye destruction print, 11 toilet bowls march across the back wall of something resembling a prison cell: the third bowl in the sequence lies dejectedly on its side, a single white beam illuminating its slightly skewed seat. The accompanying placard describes the photographer's intentions...