Live Double Exposures Mash Up Beautiful Views and Ordinary Objects

• 

 

After three hours of laying completely still, waiting for his film camera’s long exposure to complete its eight-hour run in a darkened room, Abelardo Morell started to have nightmarish hallucinations. He eventually fell asleep, but his restlessness ruined the photo anyway. That’s when he decided some of his photos would work fine without him as a subject.

Morell, a Cuban-born photographer, has become well-known for traveling the world and converting rooms into camera obscuras, or pinhole cameras. By letting light in through a small hole from outside, the viewfrom the room is projected upside-down back into the room itself, creating an interior/exterior overlap that pleasantly confuses the eye. The room essentially becomes a giant camera, but instead of film, the image is displayed on the contents of the room.

Morell’s self-portrait in paper.

Now Morell carries with him a tent camera. The tent camera works like a portable camera obscura — a periscope at the top throws the surrounding view onto the ground itself, which he then photographs, like a live double-exposure.

“Inside this darkened space I use a view camera to record the effect,” he says. “Which I think is a rather wonderful sandwich of two outdoor realities coming together. This Tent-Camera now liberates me to use camera obscura techniques in a world of new places.” He says the tent camera is heavy, and a “pain in the ass” to work with, but the painterly look it creates makes it the right tool for the job.

As a teacher in the early ’90s, Morell was turning classrooms into camera obscuras as a tool for teaching his basic photography classes — it was captivating, and it provided a basic look at the mechanics of photography. His image of a light bulb projected inside a box (see gallery above) was made as a pedagogical tool, but it eventually led to an entire body of work. It took about three months for Morell to figure out how to make successful exposures of the converted rooms.

Originally shooting on 8×10 color negative film, Morell switched to 60 megapixel digital images about 7 years ago, which cut his exposures from eight hours to five-minutes. Before the switch, he would sometimes shoot with up to three cameras in public spaces in order to hedge his bets — a lot can happen in eight hours. For a camera-obscura setting, all he really needs is a wall, and it doesn’t need to be flush with the pinhole where the light enters the room. If the wall has an angle, the image will be distorted, showing the angle.

Morell says he first learned about the importance of form from his parents, who were dancers. He saw that within the elegance of the dance, there was excitement. Morell has maintained this fresh sense of discovery throughout his career and has explored his fascination with simple optics and physics by experimenting with stop-motion, camera obscuras, photograms and digital photography.

A turning point for Morell as an artist was becoming a father. He had been making street photography, but having children caused him to turn inwards. He found himself looking closely at the things in front of him, and more carefully. The street photography gave way to images that incorporated his family and objects near at hand, which eventually gave way to his work with camera obscuras.

Morell will be setting up the tent camera in Toledo, Spain on the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death to make a photograph showing the view from El Greco’s famous landscape painting of the city. Plans are also in the works to take the tent camera to Giverny, Claude Monet’s gardens in Normandy. Morell’s first retrospective in 15 years, Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door, features 100 works made from 1986 until the present. It opens on October 1 at Los Angeles’ Getty Museum and runs through January 5.