Abelardo Morell
published by Phaidon, 2006,
www.phaidon.com
Morell's initial photographic training was in the "street photography" tradition of the '70s. Think Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, but in the early '80s Morell began to photograph the domestic scenes of his children, often from their point of view. As an instructor of photography in Boston in 1991, he created "Light Bulb" to illustrate the principle of photography, a lens taped onto a Martini and Rossi box, the end open, a light bulb for an image and the reversed, inverted image of that bulb floating inside the box. It was a great technical illustration but also a meditation on the mysterious process of photography itself. That image led to a series of camera obscura images using window curtains with a small hole, and hours-long exposures to record the image produced on the opposite wall. The photographer inside the camera taking a photograph.
The book is divided into themes, with a few early shots of family and street photography, then the child's world of the 80s, and the camera obscura images. Around the time his children probably started to read to themselves, Morell began photographing books, and from those book images obviously, came a series on Alice in Wonderland, with photocopies of Alice and other characters moving in and out of the books they inhabit.
In the late '90s came a series of photographs of paintings and other artwork, some montage work involving postcards and scrapbooks, and finally various abstracts and still life work including the cover shot.
Throughout the book it is obvious that Morell is concerned with point of view, how we see and how the camera itself sees. Even the cover shot of the vase on the edge of the table, while not obviously a comment on the nature of photography, is a meditation on the motion-freezing, instantaneous imaging of photography. Not as obvious as the camera obscura work, or the refracted images seen through the watery lens of a wine glass perhaps, but a still life that contains the essence of arrested motion that is photography's unique quality.
And his other concerns? It's obvious to me that one of his children spilled the water and placed the vase back on the table. With the special foresight and reach of childhood, it goes right on the edge.
This book is an excellent introduction to the art of photography as demonstrated by Abelardo Morell.