A View with a Room: Abelardo Morell’s Camera Obscura Photographs
June 4–October 16
Galleries 3 and 4

Overview: The principle of the camera obscura (Latin for dark room) has been known since antiquity: that light passing through a small aperture in a darkened chamber will project, upside-down, the image of the outside world. The basis for all photography, the camera obscura can be a darkened room or a small, hand-held box—today’s camera. The simplicity of this natural phenomenon makes it no less wondrous. As Leonardo da Vinci wrote of it, “Who would believe that so small a space could contain the image of all the universe? O mighty process!”

Since 1991, Abelardo Morell has been photographing spaces transformed by this process. He converts a common room into a camera by darkening the windows and placing a small hole in one of them; the scene outside of the room’s windows is then projected across the interior. The resulting juxtapositions can be as strange as they are delightful—upside-down houses hover above a toy-strewn floor; the Empire State Building reclines languidly across a bedspread in midtown Manhattan; the buildings of Havana, Cuba, Morell’s birthplace, dance across family pictures hanging on the wall. A View with a Room brings together 25 of the best images from Morell’s camera obscura series for an experience that is magical and revelatory.

Related Event: Hear the artist lecture on September 15.

Curator: Elizabeth Siegel, Department of Photography, the Art Institute of Chicago




Abelardo Morell. Light Bulb, 1991. Comer Foundation Fund, 1994.40. © Abelardo Morell, courtesy of Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, and Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York.