I wanted to suggest new ways in which to see – to enter into – the world.

Introduction

While we date the invention of photography to the late 1830s, the discoveries that made it possible were being harnessed and theorised much earlier. The camera obscura can be traced back at least as far as China in the fourth-century BCE, though some have suggested the effect may have played a role in the creation of prehistoric cave paintings. The ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians are known to have ground lenses from quartz crystals. Aristotle pondered a theory of colours and how they interact, ideas that the Arab philosopher Hasan Ibn al-Haytham developed more scientifically at the close of the first millennium. It is these fundamental constituents of the photographic process that the distinguished Cuban American artist Aberlardo Morell has been exploring and reviving in his recent work.

For over a quarter of a century Abelardo Morrell was a professor of photography. The work for which he is now best known had its antecedence in a simple classroom demonstration. An incandescent light bulb stands before a cardboard box in which a small lens has been set. Inside the box a ghostly inverted image of the light bulb manifests on the opposite wall. A simple camera obscura. He later applied the same technique to whole rooms, photographing the tipped-up image of the outside world as it flowed over the furnishing of the interior. After he retired from teaching he took this idea out into the field, developing a portable tent-camera within which he could photograph the landscape before him projected onto the ground beneath his feet. The resulting images engender a powerful visual and conceptual shift in the perceived nature of landscape itself, as near and far, vista and texture marry in the moment.

Over a career spanning half a century, Aberlardo Morell has made many photographic series. However, in this interview we focus on the work he has made in the past decade and a half. Work which has advanced through the innovative reapplication of past knowledge, grounding the art of landscape in a fresh and aesthetically persuasive way.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

While we will focus on two main bodies of your work in the interview, I would like to begin by asking, more broadly (and perhaps abstractly), how you would describe your approach to photography?

I have been a photographer for over fifty years now and in that time my pictures have, of course, undergone many changes. However, if there is something constant that runs throughout my work it is in the desire to come up with unusual ways through which to explore and consider reality.

How did your series called ‘Colour Theory’ begin?

I worked in black-and-white film for thirty years. My heroes were people like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank… At that time, I just felt that colour and I did not belong together. I guess I had always associated black-and-white with deep feelings, in harmony with a tragic sense of life. Colour felt too gaudy! But in 2005 I did start working in colour. And when I did, I fell in love with it. I was like a kid in a candy store. And now it’s colour that I mostly use.

[Left] © Abelardo Morell ‘White Vessels Composition #1’ 2019
[Right] © Abelardo Morell ‘Woodblock Construction#1, For Steve Reich’ 2021

The series ‘Colour Theory’ began as a way of making simple visual explanations about the way in which colours blend. I love what happens when you make multiple exposures in colour rearranging the subject between shots; the different colours and shapes that arise, forming new spaces and volumes. Quite simply I wanted to suggest new ways in which to see – to enter into – the world… and perhaps the underworlds… that photography can reveal. This is, of course, what painters, sculptors, composers, dancers also do. But for me, I know I will find no better way to express myself than photography.

You went on to make similar images with glass and ceramic objects, and with wooden blocks. How did your ideas evolve as you approached each new set of shapes and surfaces?

This work arose from my study of Cubism. Picasso, Braque, and Gris made superb pictures of rather ordinary objects, but in the act of envisioning them they reinvented the ordinary. Things we all usually take for granted were reimagined. Because a lot of my still lifes are made with multiple exposures, they suggest several states of reality in a single image. What I find interesting is that when solid geometry is photographed from different points of view and blended together later, what you get is not something that suggests Cubism. It is Cubism!

[Left] © Abelardo Morell ‘Laura and Brady in the Shadow of Our House’ 1994
[Right] © Abelardo Morell ‘Camera Obscura: View of Brookline in Brady’s Room’ 1992

You began as a street photographer, but your later work (and all the work we are discussing here) involves stillness and extended periods of time rather than the rapid capture of instants. What led to this change and what is it you like about this slower, more static approach to the medium?

When my son Brady and daughter Laura were born in the late eighties and early nineties, I stopped making street pictures and began concentrating on the objects in their childhood worlds and our everyday things around the house. I started working with a large view camera which, in the relatively low light of our apartment, required exposes that ran into minutes rather than fractions of a second. Dwelling in these new extended pockets of time I became immersed in those everyday subjects, experiencing a new sense of them.

[Left] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: View Looking Southeast Toward the Chisos Mountains, Big Bend National Park, Texas’ 2010
[Right] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River from Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming’ 2011

We move now to your tent-camera images. You had been creating more traditional camera obscura images in blacked-out rooms in the city. What led you to this novel way of creating images of the countryside?

In 2010, I was commissioned by the Alturas Foundation to make pictures in Big Bend National Park in West Texas. I wondered how I could extend my camera obscura work into the outdoors. After some research I made a device that I could install inside a lightproof tent which enabled me to project an image of the landscape directly onto the darkened ground within. The results amazed me! I had never made such a picture before, and it was done in the most straightforward way one could think of. I love this approach because the results are naturally disorienting and made in the very site of the landscape itself. It feels honest. And that is a very important quality that I continually seek to achieve.

How did the tent-camera work?

The device consists of a large tripod with a plate on top that holds two things side by side: a large prism and my camera. The prism serves as a periscope projecting the view before me down through a lens which focuses the image the ground below. Beside it, the camera also points down so that I can photograph that projected scene. The quality and patina of the resulting image is a product of the projected view and whatever the ground below consists of… sand, rocks, grass, cement…

The size of the tent has changed over the years. The earlier versions were large – maybe ten by seven feet – big enough to accommodate me, my assistant, and the equipment within its lightproof space. I was using film and so everything had to happen inside the tent and the exposure time could be several hours. It got awfully hot in there!

[Left] Yosemite National Park 2012 – photo © C.J. Heyliger
[Right] Near Arles, France 2022 – photo © Max LaBelle

When I started working with a digital camera, it was possible to connect it to my laptop outside the tent. This allowed my assistant and me to work in the open air and the tent could be much smaller and more portable. The digital camera also reduced the exposure times considerably – down to less than a minute in most cases. All round, it became a much more manageable process.

It is also important that the tent is totally lightproof. The brighter it is outside and darker it is inside the tent, the better the colour and contrast in the resulting picture. So, the cloth the tent is made from is crucial. I did a lot of research and eventually found a material developed by a scientific company that tests lasers. The result is pitch-blackness, which adds greatly to the vibrancy of the final image.

[Left] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: Pond in Hampstead Heath, London, England’ 2017
[Right] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: Rapidly Moving Clouds Over Field #1, Flatford, England’ 2017

In 2017, you travelled to England where you made the series ‘After Constable’. How did that project begin?

I love and admire the work of many painters. My studio is full of art books, especially of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Constable was a wonderfully innovative landscape artist who influenced the work of many important artists who came later. The patina of his paintings feels like the earth itself! And, because earth is a material that some of my views land on, it felt natural to begin the project that was to become ‘After Constable’.

Later, in 2022 and 2023, you visited France and made ‘In the Terrain of van Gogh’ and ‘In the Terrain of Monet’. What drew you to this period of painting and to these artists in particular?

To me the period in France during the mid-nineteenth century is especially rich and interesting, radically so. And, of course, photography was also born around that time. I find this coming together of painters and photographers making landscape views remarkably rich and exciting. I am drawn to artists whose work is strongly connected to a particular location. How can you separate van Gogh from Arles or Monet from Giverny? These were the places where fresh and original views of nature led to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. I loved photographing there.

[Left] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: Poppy Field #1, Near Vétheuil, France’ 2023
[Right] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: Poplars by the Oise River #1, Auvers, France’ 2023

It is fascinating the way that when you project the scene before the camera onto the ground below it, the result is so painterly.

One of the pleasures of using my tent-camera is the natural patina the surface variations of the ground lend the final image. As you say, the results are weirdly painterly yet they are achieved without trickery. Each picture is a straight photograph. It’s not like I use an ‘impressionism filter’ to get that effect. My artistic approach allows the picture to come together directly before the camera.

Are you seeking to reproduce photographically the paintings of these artists who inspire you?

No! That would be boring… and pointless. It’s more about being in the presence of history. I find it stimulating to imagine how those earlier artists must have passed through these same landscapes. In a way it lets me feel like I am part of the historical arc of artmaking – its trajectory. It becomes for me a conduit for my own visual expression. I don’t want to repeat the past. What I want to do is make something new.

[Left] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: View of Monet’s Garden #1, Giverny, France’ 2023
[Right] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: Wheat Field, The Camargue, France’ 2022

It is easy to layer images together in Photoshop. Why do you choose this method, which involves so much more work?

I work very hard to come up with something original and strange. The experience of sweating in the heat, hearing the cicadas, getting hungry while looking at a landscape I want to photograph, that is the kind of artistic presence I want to have. Perhaps that was also the way van Gogh felt…

The idea of coming up with my pictures by getting a bit of software to insert something that was not there is, to me, unthinkable. If you were there with me and were to look inside my tent what you would have seen is what is in my picture. Something real. Something that was actually there.

Your oeuvre is full of experimentation, of breaking away from the conventions of photography. Have you found this becoming easier or harder as you get older?

I do think that, for a long time, what I have been doing is always moving forward and discovering new freedoms to explore. I’m not sure age alone gives you anything much, except a few new aches and pains. What really makes a difference is continuing to work.

[Left] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: View of Vineyards, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France’ 2022
[Right] © Abelardo Morell ‘Tent-Camera Image: View of the Epte River #1, Near Giverny, France’ 2023

As to conventions: they are useful until they are not. Sometimes you have to break with them. There have been times when I have had to be brave enough to abandon beliefs and practices I had once considered sacred. Ways of working that I had thought made me distinctively who I believed I was. Easier said than done. But necessary in order to move forward.

Over the years, what have you learned about yourself through making photographs?

Photography can provide a new entry into reality. I have come to recognise that, for me, it is a curiosity about the palpable (often quite ordinary) things in the world that animates ideas, setting them in motion… because that is often where the picture is.

All I really know is that I would be very unhappy if I didn’t make photographs anymore. It’s the most powerful thing I have that fully catapults me into my being.

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Abelardo Morell’s artworks are included in many prestigious public and private collections including, in the USA, The Art Institute of Chicago; The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. And overseas in Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; The Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock, England; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK.

His work has been published in eight monographs: ‘A Camera in a Room: Photographs by Abelardo Morell’ (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), ‘Abelardo Morell, Face to Face: Photographs at the Gardner Museum’ (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1998), ‘A Book of Books’ (Bulfinch Press, 2002), ‘Camera Obscura’ (Bulfinch Press, 2004), ‘Abelardo Morell’ (Phaidon Press, 2006), ‘The Universe Next Door’ (The Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), ‘Flowers for Lisa’ (Abrams, 2018), and ‘Tent Camera’ (Nazraeli Press, 2019). He lives and works in Newton, Massachusetts.

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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