Abelardo Morell: Van Gogh through a pinhole

ARLES, France, June 2022 — Abelardo Morell was on a country road outside Arles, in the South of France. Cicadas were buzzing with almost hallucinatory intensity. It was 10 a.m., a hot day at the start of July. Scattered across a field, half a dozen cypress trees stood like shaggy sentinels. Down the road, a field of heavy-headed sunflowers dazzled yellow under a blue sky.

 

Morell had come to Arles to take photographs in the places Vincent van Gogh painted 130 years ago. But, even as he stood amid the painter’s beloved Provençal landscape, he seemed undaunted.

-Sebastian Smee, The Washington Post

History of abelardo morell's tent camera

 

 

Observing the landscape with specially equipped tents and lenses was practiced by artists in the 18th and 19th century and even earlier in order to trace on paper what they saw projected in the darkness of their tents. Interestingly, this approach to picturing the land was taken even before the invention of photography in 1839.

 

In considering this old way to envision the landscape I began to design ways that I could use to do the same thing in 2010. Over the years my design has improved my picture making, and now, with my latest incarnation of the Tent Camera, my pictures have become sharper and more vivid. This is the device that I used to make pictures in the South of France in the Summer of 2022.

 

Essentially, I am now using a light tight tent with a periscope type lens on top so that any landscape can be projected onto the ground inside the darkened space of the tent. I also have a digital camera next to the periscope looking down towards the ground to capture the sandwich of the landscape projection and the dirt and rocks of the ground surface. I no longer need to be inside the tent because my camera is operated with a connected laptop outside. This new design is smaller and more portable too.

-Abelardo Morell