A riveting retrospective of the imaginative photographs created by contemporary artist Abelardo Morell Over the past twenty-five years, Abelardo Morell (b. 1948) has earned international praise for his images that use the language of photography to explore visual surprise and wonder. Born in Havana, Cuba, Morell came to the United States as a teenager in 1962 and later studied photography, earning an MFA from Yale University. He gained attention for intimate, black-and-white pictures of domestic objects from a child’s point of view, inspired by the birth of his son in 1986, as well as images in which he turns a room into a giant camera obscura, projecting exterior views onto interior spaces; and photographs of books that revel in their sensory materiality.
In more recent years, he has turned to color, exploring the camera obscura with a painterly delight and innovating a tent camera that projects outdoor scenes onto a textured ground. Across his career, Morell has approached photography with remarkable wit and creativity, examining everyday objects with childlike curiosity. The first in-depth treatment in fifteen years, this handsome and important book examines Morell’s career to the present day, including his earlier works in black-and-white and never before published color photographs from the past decade. An essay by Elizabeth Siegel, along with a recent interview with the artist and an illustrated chronology of his life and works, offers a riveting portrait of this contemporary photographer and his ongoing artistic endeavors.

Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door

Arts & Photography

Abelardo Morell

Elizabeth Siegel

History & Criticism

Art Institute of Chicago

Abelardo Morell makes photographs that transform everyday things into magical, ominous and mysterious objects. His spell-binding pictures of books, maps, paintings and household items explore reality and illusion through the use of surprising perspectives, unexpected angles, distorted sizes and distances. In Morell's hands a stack of library books are transformed into bars of gold and a plain paper bag becomes a portal to another dimension. This is the only book that covers the photographer's complete career to the present day and included here are his extraordinary camera obscura images, his tender family photographs and more recently the photographer's enchanting illustrations of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

A visual tribute to the printed word, this sumptuous ode to books will be irresistible to anyone who treasures the feel of fine paper and the special allure of a clothbound volume. A BOOK OF BOOKS showcases Abelardo Morell's extraordinary photographs of unusual books, like an impossibly large dictionary, illustrated tomes whose characters appear to leap off the page, and water-damaged books that take on sculptural form. Bookish quotations by Hawthorne, Borges, Cocteau, and others accompany the photographs throughout.

A Book of Books

Photography & Video

Bulfinch Press / Little, Brown and Company

Abelardo Morell, author of the award-winning A Book of Books, makes magical camera obsucra images in darkened interiors. The deceptively simple process - he blacks out all the windows, leaving just a pinhole opening in one of them - produces photographs of astonishing, complex beauty. Because of the nature of refracted light, the world outside is projected upside down into the nearly blackened room, in essence converting the space into the interior of a camera. Morell then photographs the results with a large-format view camera, often requiring exposures of eight hours or more. Locations around the world were chosen for the interesting details and juxtapositions they would elicit - the Empire State Building lies across a bedspread in a midtown Manhattan interior; the Tower of London is imprinted on the walls of a room in the Tower Hotel; the countryside in rural Cuba, Morell's birthplace, plays across the walls of a crumbling chamber that is rich with the patina of its own history. Every image is full of surprises and revelations.

Camera Obscura

Luc Sante

Bulfinch

San Francisco Plays Itself utilizes the notion of autobiography as a way to explore the work of contemporary artists who have engaged with the cultural and physical landscape of the Bay Area. Featuring more than 35 photographs by 31 artists, accompanying texts provide a contextualizing articulation by each artist of his or her work that serves to emphasize the autobiographical focus in egalitarian terms. The cumulative effect of these projects exemplifies the evolution of a specific time and place, while representing the unlimited experiences and possibilities of life in a major American metropolitan region. INCLUDING WORK &amp; CONTRIBUTIONS BY: John Chiara, Mark Citret, Judy Dater, Kota Ezawa, Alex Fradkin, Jona Frank, Richard Gilles, Jim Goldberg, Katy Grannan, John Harding, Chauncey Hare, Christina Koci Hernandez, Zig Jackson, Michael Jang, Keba Konte, Annie Leibovitz, Alice Waters, Ken Light, Ari Marcopoulos, Mary Ellen Mark, Laura Albert, Ken Miller, William Vollmann, Richard Misrach, Abelardo Morell, Dan Nicoletta, Gus Van Sant, Catherine Opie, Adam Klein, Michael Rauner, Alice Shaw, Shi Guorui, Larry Sultan, Sergio De La Torre, Tseng Kwong Chi, Catherine Wagner, and Mary Gaitskill. 
PLUS THE NEW CD BY THE SIZE QUEENS featuring guest appearances by Laura Albert, Carlos Forster, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Tim Mooney, John Murry, Danny Pearson, and Terese Taylor.

An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself

Alice Waters

Catherine Opie

Larry Sultan

MARY GAITSKILL

Mary Ellen Mark

Richard Misrach

Chauncey Hare

Gus Van Sant

John Chiara

Laura Albert

Shi Guorui

The Size Queens

SF Camerawork Publications

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Books by Abelardo Morell