Abelardo Morell (Monographs)

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In 1986, Abelardo Morell began a family and his fascination with his son engaged a new interest in this domestic environment as a subject. Morell began exploring the world from a child's perspective - approaching mundane household objects in a new way that challenges the viewer's perception of reality and how we see. Morell transforms everyday objects through the use of distorting angles and extreme close-ups, surprising perspectives that confuse and jar with our expectations: viewed from below a stack of toy blocks tower over the viewer, a close-up of liquid pouring from a jar seems ominous and dramatic rather than an everyday occurrence. Similarly, Morell continued to transform the familiar into the surprising in his series of photographs of books, maps, American money and, more recently, a series that illustrates a new edition of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". This preoccupation with reality and illusion is most clearly realised in Morell's series of camera obscura images. He takes an ordinary room and tapes black plastic over the windows, leaving only a 3/8" hole for thelight. After setting up a large-format camera in the room and pointing it at the opposite wall, Morell leaves - a single exposure takes 8 hours. In the resulting images a scene of Brookline floats upside-down along the walls of his son's bedroom; abroad landmarks like the Uffizi and the Eiffel Tower are projected across hotel rooms. In this, Morell's best known and most ambitious series, the distinction between the outside and the domestic world is merged and Morell's preoccupation with the mechanics of human vision and the principles of photography is manifest. Morell continues to teach, publish and exhibit his works. His photographs are included in numerous public collections and individual shows include the major travelling exhibition 'Abelardo Morell and the Camera Eye' (2002).