Abelardo Morell is a fine art photographer and teacher born in Cuba in 1948. He Moved to the USA and studied for a BA in Bowdoin College, Main and an MFA at Yale University of Art. He has spent most of his career combining personal photography projects alongside teaching at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.
His early images are family snapshots, and during his education he followed the path of Robert Frank and Cartier-Bresson with street street photography capturing quirky moments around the streets and in shops and hairdressing salons.
He went in to teaching in 1983 having decided that ‘his own additions to the street photography canon would probably never be of the order of Frank’ [1], p8. Having married, and following the arrival of his son Brady in 1986, he produced a series of images from a child’s perspective resulting in the ‘Childhood’ series in 1987.
In the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series [2] Morell places significance on his early years as a boy in the troublesome environment of Havana before his family moved to New York.
In his Artist Talk at Brown University [3], the birth of his child in 1986 was the point that he realised he was a grown up. This started to influence his photography and he decided to take pictures in a different way. He was interested in the idea of viewpoint and how photography is good at acknowledging different heights (standing up and sitting down). He observed that photography can show two different worlds . In the ‘Childhood’ series he is mimicking the behaviour of a baby crawling around the floor. ‘I felt I was just beginning, like a baby, to be a photographer… it liberated a certain kind of imagination.‘ [3], (6:14).
These images are the ones that brought Morell to my attention and having researched a lot of his later work, it is these that remain my favourites. Probably because they are everyday scenes but with an artistic eye, light and viewpoint. These types of images should be within my grasp. He has chosen a subject and delivered some great images. Enough to admire for the casual observer but a little extra for those willing to spend the time.
His subsequent work was around the properties and physicality of photography. ‘Light Bulb’ (1991) arose from teaching students about cameras and appeared on the front cover of the MoMA exhibition ‘More Than One Photography’ in 1992. This brought him to the attention of the critics. The exhibition itself being a sort of acceptance of a change in Art Photography where artist presented ideas rather than a complete narrative within the frame.
He followed this up with some Camera Obscura work in black and white. He stayed in various apartment and hotel rooms in big cities and captured cityscapes and well known structures and projected them on to the walls. This was an obvious progression of his Light Bulb image and it is interesting how an idea develops.
Other series include books, maps, dictionaries, children’s stories such as his Alice In Wonderland composites.
Significantly he has remained photographing in black and white until only recently for multiple camera obscura projects, capturing colour scenes with use of a tent and projecting them on to the ground.
I really like ‘Small Vase at edge of a Table which I believe signifyies potential danger and fragility. The spillage on the floor suggests that it has already been knocked once and the next nudge may take it over the edge.
It is difficult to position Morell on the modernist / post-modernist scale which I think is what makes him and his work more interesting. His clean black and white images, no frills or captions suggest he is firmly in the modernist camp in line with his education. But this is countered by his work where the photographic process is the subject. Black and white allows him to study light in greater detail. Images of books and bindings points to the printing process. And obviously his Camera Obscura work in black and white, and now more recently in colour, is a way of recognising the basics of photography coupled with a modern narrative.
Other contemporary photographers such a Wolfgang Tilmans have used the photographic process as their subject but have combined this with use of colour and technology. Ultimately though, they have taken the same subject and delivered it in different ways.
I like Morell’s work for its close examination of the subject, but, I feel I am always asking the question ‘why stay with black and white for so long?’. The answer is possibly in the timing of his education and the key influencers of that era. The ‘Childhood’ series works in black and white because it is nostalgic and what was the norm when he was a baby. The examinations of process are less easy to understand why he felt black and white was appropriate.
Morell does not strike me as a rebel but he has chosen a more studious approach to his ‘rule-breaking’. I admire this as a human characteristic, not flashy, but quietly confident. It does not get the attention it may deserve but then again it is work that is understood and admired by people that count.
References:
- Abelardo Morell, R.B. Woodward, Phaidon Press, 2005
- Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series: Abelardo Morell [accessed 27/02/2017]
- Abelardo Morell Artist Talk 10.12.16 at Brown University, Rhode Island. [accessed 27/02/2017]
Martyn Rainbird 