Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba, and received a BA from Bowdoin College and an MFA from Yale University. While his early work is portraiture and street photography, he is best known for using a camera obscura technique, where he blacks out a room save for a 3/8-inch hole that allows light to pass through and strike the surface inside where the image is reproduced upside-down but with color and perspective preserved. His images using this process range from black and white renderings of the Empire State Building to color photographs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Morrell also employs cliché verre (a technique of reproducing images which a glass plate coated with collodion is etched and photographed against a black background) and photograms (pictures produced with photographic materials, such as light-sensitive paper, but without a camera) in his work. Morrell also has a large body of work on household objects and antique book pages.
His publications include a photographic illustration of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1998), A Camera in a Room (1995), A Book of Books (2002), Camera Obscura (2004), and Abelardo Morell (2005).
His photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and others
Mary O'Donnell Hulme