Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell’s photographs reach through art history to one of the earliest predecessors of the medium, the camera obscura. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, he has returned throughout his career to the fundamental mechanics of light and vision, using them to transform ordinary rooms and landscapes into sites of quiet revelation.

His most celebrated body of work, the camera obscura series, draws on one of the foundational discoveries of image-making. Morell darkens an entire room and leaves a single small opening in a window. Light passes through that aperture and projects an inverted image of the outside world onto the interior walls. City streets, trees, and skylines appear suspended across beds, ceilings, and wallpaper. Morell then photographs this projection, joining interior and exterior in a single frame. The process follows the basic laws of optics, yet the result feels magical and imaginative, as the world outside settles inside the room. This sustained investigation earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and remains central to his practice.

Morell later extended the idea outdoors with his tent-camera works. Using a portable structure to create a temporary camera obscura in the landscape, Morell projects the surrounding view directly onto the ground beneath him. Grass, sand, and stone receive the image of the horizon, merging surface and scene. These works connect photography’s earliest mechanics with the tradition of plein air painting, engaging sites once depicted by artists such as van Gogh and Monet while forging a distinctly contemporary vocabulary.

Alongside these series, Morell has also created influential series of still lifes, flowers, books, and other ordinary objects, each grounded in careful observation and technical precision. A major retrospective, The Universe Next Door, opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 and traveled to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. His work is held in leading public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.