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Camera Obscura: The Empire State Building in Bedroom

Date:

1994

Artist:

Abelardo Morell
American, born Cuba 1948

About this artwork

The principle of the camera obscura (Latin for “dark room”) has been known since ancient Greek and Roman times: light passing through a small aperture in a dark chamber will project an upside-down, reversed image of the scene outside. The basis for all lens-based images, the camera obscura can be a room or a small, hand-held box—today’s camera.

Abelardo Morell used the camera obscura in his teaching, and in 1991 he began photographing the strange juxtapositions that occurred when the outside world was projected onto a domestic interior. He covered the windows of the chosen room with black plastic and poked a 3/8-inch hole in the material, placing a view camera inside to document the image that came through. The exposure took six to eight hours, eliminating all moving things from the scene and rendered objects that moved even slightly as a blur. In addition to making a number of choices to shape the relationship between interior and exterior—selecting the room, the view, and the position of the pinhole—Morell also often rearranges furniture and smaller objects in a given scene, so these seemingly natural photographs are in fact highly constructed.

Morell made his first camera obscura works in his own domestic space, but he soon traveled to New York, whose skyscrapers and landmarks had seemed overwhelming to him as an immigrant teenager in the 1960s. In this image of the Empire State Building, he domesticated the tower, depicting it sprawling languidly in a bed as its shorter neighbors hover along the ceiling.

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Photography and Media

Artist

Abelardo Morell

Title

Camera Obscura: The Empire State Building in Bedroom

Place

United States (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

Made 1994

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Edition

of 15

Dimensions

Image: 46 × 57 cm (18 1/8 × 22 1/2 in.); Paper: 51 × 61 cm (20 1/8 × 24 1/16 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Reference Number

2014.1221

Copyright

© Abelardo Morell, courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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