Famed artist talks photography

Some people admire the view from a hotel room, but photographer Abelardo Morell covers it with black plastic and duct tape.

Why, would anyone block the view from a hotel room in Paris or a penthouse in Manhattan? Well, to make a photograph.

Morell discussed this process — called the camera obscura technique — at a slide lecture, sponsored by the Program in Visual Arts, in 185 Nassau last week.

Morell projected an image through a small hole cut in the plastic. This image appeared upside down on the wall opposite the aperture. His camera captured the room and the image projected into it over a period of approximately 8 hours.

It is actually a simple technique that can be seen in nature, according to Morell.

"I was trying to explain what a camera obscura was within the confines of a room. And again, it's a small opening in a dark space creating images. This happens outside on a regular day like this, especially when the leaves and branches crisscross each other," Morell said in an interview after the lecture.

He was referring to the patches of light that filter through the branches and leaves of a tree on a sunny day.

"It's a very natural occurrence of a natural obscura effect. When you see little spotted things in the world, that not just streaks, that's actually the sun creating an image," Morell said.

He has projected the Eiffel Tower onto the wall of a French hotel room; the Manhattan skyline onto the wall of a swanky penthouse; and even been inside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to create a composition.

Morell recalled his photograph inside the New York City penthouse and the writer from "The New Yorker" who covered it is as a story.

"We lay on the floor looking up at 3rd Avenue at the taxis coming, and we were there for 25 minutes...That's how dramatic and innocent the thing is," he said.

But expensive venues and spectacular scenes are not necessary for his work. According to Morell, part of what makes his photographs exciting is that they do not require these things.

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In fact, his first photograph using the camera obscura technique was done inside his house, and the view that Morell observed from this setting was certainly less dramatic than the view from the penthouse.

"My wife and son and I, we sat in this room watching the garbage men pick up the garbage outside of the house," said Morell. But despite its ordinariness, his experience was no less dramatic.

"It was magical. I felt like I had invented photography," said Morell, "and all in the house. I didn't have to be in Tibet."

But, wait. The garbage men didn't appear in Morell's photograph. Nor were there any taxis in his Manhattan composition. How?

Morell's exposures are so long that anything moving disappears in the finished product. The absence of people, clock hands and cars from his photographs has a chilling effect, according to Morell. He specifically referred to a composition that included Times Square.

'Weird photography'

"Think about two days in Times Square and how many people would have gone through there. There's not one person registered. It's weird photography here, almost alluding to death itself and passing," he said.

Morell began his camera obscura photographs in the early 90s but has been photographing street scenes, family members, drug dealers, baby bottles, paper bags and books since his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College in Maine.

He claims that the postmodernist lament, "What's the use?" pushed him towards his camera obscura photographs.

"I wanted to sort of begin some art from scratch," he said. Morell also suggested that his family's first apartment in New York City inspired this technique that requires most of the light in a room to be blocked. The apartment had no windows except for two in the basement.

"This kind of being in the dark shows up later in my work," said Morell at the beginning of his lecture.

More generally, Morell claimed that he creates by never succumbing to boredom.

"I have no time to sit around and say, 'Poor me, I have no ideas,' " he said.

Morell is constantly engaged with the world around him, constantly driven to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. He described himself as a grown up child trying to "recover some of those earlier instincts with better tools."

Abelardo Morell is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art. He has published five books, the most recent of which is "A Book of Books," and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. Morell currently lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his family.