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Tent-Camera Image on Ground: Walden Pond

Abelardo Morell

Tent-Camera Image on Ground: Walden Pond
2016
Color photograph

Edition of 6
Image size: 48 x 64 inches  (121.9 x 162.6 cm)
Paper size: 58 x 74 inches  (147.3 x 188 cm)
Frame size: 60 1/2 x 76 1/2 inches  (153.7 x 194.3 cm)
(Inventory #33614)

Since 1991, Abelardo Morell has converted rooms into Camera Obscuras in order to photograph the strange and delightful meeting of the outside world with the room’s interior. In setting up a room to make this kind of photograph, he covers all windows with black plastic in order to achieve total darkness. Then, he cuts a small hole in the material he uses to cover the windows. This opening allows an inverted image of the view outside to flood onto the back walls of the room. Typically, he then uses a large-format camera capture this scenario as a photograph.

In an effort to find new ways to push this technique, Morell has worked with his assistants, C.J. Heyliger and subsequently, Maxwell LaBelle, on designing lightproof tents, which can project views of the surrounding landscape, via periscope-type optics, onto the surface of the ground inside the tent. Within this darkened space, like in the indoor rooms, he uses a camera to record the sandwich of these two outdoor realities meeting on the ground. Depending on the quality of the surface terrain, these views can take on a variety of painterly effects.

Morell’s tent-camera liberates him to use the Camera Obscura technique in places where it would have been previously impossible to work, because he now has a portable room, so to speak.

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<p”>Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from The Yale University School of Art. He has received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College in 1997 and from Lesley University in 2014.

<p”>His publications include a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland(1998) by Dutton Children’s Books, A Camera in a Room(1995) by Smithsonian Press, A Book of Books(2002) and Camera Obscura (2004) by Bulfinch Press andAbelardo Morell(2005), published by Phaidon Press. The Universe Next Door(2013), published by The Art Institute of Chicago.  Tent-Camera (2018), published by Nazraeli Press.  Flowers for Lisa (2018), published by Abrams Books.

<p”>He has received a number of awards and grants, which include a Guggenheim fellowship in 1994 and an Infinity Award in Art from ICP in 2011. In November 2017, he received a Lucie Award for achievement in fine art.

<p”>His work has been collected and shown in many galleries, institutions and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, The Chicago Art Institute, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Houston Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Victoria & Albert Museum and over seventy other museums in the United States and abroad. A retrospective of his work organized jointly by the Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty in Los Angeles and The High Museum in Atlanta closed in May 2014 after a year of travel. Most recently, his work was included in the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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