A Trajectory of Creativity and Curiosity

Imagine a room so dark it forgets it exists—until a pinhole lets in the outside world and paints it, upside-down, across the walls. This is the world of Abelardo Morell: a world where light becomes pigment, time bends, and the ordinary is rendered utterly strange. He is not merely a photographer. He is a conjurer of altered perspectives, a translator of what the world forgets to see.

Born in Cuba and exiled to New York at 13, Morell’s path was shaped by dislocation, a sense of being in-between. Not quite here, not quite there. This sensibility—this interior liminality—feeds his practice. Inspired early on by street photographers like Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, his initial work prowled the world with the hungry curiosity of an outsider. But it was fatherhood that flipped his lens inward, both literally and emotionally.

Seeing Like a Child: The Intimacy of the Interior

In 1986, the arrival of Morell’s first child catalyzed a radical shift. The gritty urbanity of his handheld camera gave way to the contemplative patience of a large-format view camera. Domestic interiors—lamps, books, toys—became poetic subjects.

I started making photographs as if I were a child myself.

– He explained.

This was no naïve regression, but a methodical unlearning: an invitation to look slowly, absurdly, reverently.

The Renaissance of the Camera Obscura

Morell didn’t invent the camera obscura, but he dragged it out of the dusty margins of history and made it sing. Starting in 1991, he blacked out rooms, punched tiny holes in plastic-covered windows, and waited—sometimes for hours—as inverted projections of the outside world seeped into interior spaces. A Manhattan skyline overlaid on a Brooklyn bedroom. A Parisian Street flickering across a Venetian hotel. These were images not taken, but received, like a séance of light.

His early images were painstakingly crafted in black and white, exposures lasting up to eight hours. But by 2005, Morell evolved the technique: incorporating diopter lenses and prisms to sharpen, brighten, and invert the projections. Color entered the equation—not gaudy, but tender, like aging frescoes glowing in a cathedral.

The Tent Camera: Landscapes Beneath Your Feet

In 2010, Morell brought his vision outdoors with the invention of the tent camera. Think of it as a mobile observatory for terrestrial wonders. A periscope-like lens projected the outside landscape directly onto the ground within the tent, marrying two realities—the one overhead and the one underfoot. The result? Ghostly mountains stretched across pebbles; cloudscapes brushed against concrete. It was photography’s answer to geology, an archaeology of light.

These weren’t just clever juxtapositions. They were meditations on place, memory, and the overlooked.

Texture is part of the meaning of an image.

– Morell insists.

The earth itself becomes a canvas—gritty, cracked, rebellious—offering resistance and surprise.

Museums, Mirrors, and the Theater of Meaning

Art museums, too, became sites of investigation. Invited by institutions to photograph their interiors, Morell staged uncanny juxtapositions: a Cézanne peeking through a corridor; a gallery reflected within itself. Here, he examined how art is framed—both literally and psychologically. With the switch to digital in 2010, his process accelerated, but never lost its contemplative edge. Now, fleeting light, shifting clouds, even people could be captured with clarity.

What we see is familiar—but reassembled with reverence and strangeness. It is a method of seeing that doesn’t seek spectacle. Instead, it restores awe to the everyday.

Between Realism and Surrealism: The Earned Wonder

Though Morell resists the label of fantasy, his work achieves a kind of lucid dreaminess.

I’m more in tune with ‘the real’ being quite complicated.

– He says, citing the influence of Magritte, Klee, and Latin American magical realism.

His images don’t float elephants across ceilings. They let a chair or an apple whisper a secret you’ve forgotten.

The surreal, in Morell’s world, isn’t manufactured—it’s revealed. Earned. Earned through time, labor, and presence. He rejects shortcuts. Photoshop projections?

That would be fucking boring.

– He quips.

His process demands patience. Weather. Waiting. Sweat.

There’s a certain feeling of earning it, which I love.

The Intersectional Image: Memory, Light, and Exile

Ultimately, Morell’s images are intersections—between public and private, past and present, art and life. The camera obscura is a metaphor for exile: seeing the world through the membrane of displacement. His photographs, layered and luminous, are not explanations but invitations.

I like surprising people with what they know, but seen in a different light.

– He says.

He wants you to pause, to reconsider what you thought you knew.

And in that simple twist, that poetic inversion, Morell offers us not answers but alchemy.

V