Camera Obscura Image of El Vedado,
Habana, Looking Northwest (2002)

Abelardo Morell
Spectral Images

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.
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Abelardo Morell

CONVERSATION: A BOOK OF BOOKS
Paul Solman talks to photographer Abelardo Morell about his latest book, a collection of his photographs of books entitled A Book of Books.

Abelardo Morell
Cuban-American photographer talks with Robert Birnbaum

Robert Birnbaum: Looking at your book, The Book of Books, I thought about the dichotomy of a visual culture and a literary culture and how we are always being told that we live in a visual culture. That's puzzling to me because I can't see how you can have pictures without words being attached.

Abelardo Morell: Right, right. Actually there is an interesting tradition of important photographic books like Robert Frank's The Americans, which had a very short poetic [Jack] Kerouac text, not really explaining the pictures at all, and Walker Evans' American Photographs, which, when it came out, had no words—zero words. There has been that kind of backlash of artists trying to take claim over the language of the visual without the support of words—apart and being considered on its own merits. I like the idea that images alone can carry it all. But I think you are right, the appetite for visual stuff is somewhat perverse now because it assumes that there is no intellectual appetite at the same time. It's this weird "swallow it fast" and pay now. I think a lot about language. The idea of how things are communicated and that's one of my interests in books, the surface that communicates ideas and stories and all that. In some ways, I am trying to integrate the two. I even have a close-up of a page of A Tale Of Two Cities and A Farewell to Arms to try to get a visual equivalent of what it is to read or to have words be significant.
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Down the Rabbit Hole (1998) Abelardo Morell

  all Abelardo Morell links thanks to wood s lot