Details

Title

Camera Obscura: View of Atlanta Looking South Down Peachtree Street in Hotel Room

Artist/Maker

Abelardo Morell (American, born Cuba, 1948)

Date

2013

Medium

Pigmented inkjet print

Dimensions

Contact the museum for more information

Credit

Commissioned with funds from the H.B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust and gift of the artist for the Picturing the South series

Accession #

2013.805

Location

Currently not on view

To create his camera obscura images, Morell covers windows with black plastic and pokes a 3/8-inch hole in the material. The outside world is projected upside down onto a wall, and he then uses a view camera inside the room to document this confluence of interior and exterior spaces. More recently, he has employed a diopter lens—an optical tool that significantly reduces exposure time and increases the brightness and sharpness of the image. Photographing with a digital camera reduces exposure time even further, from hours to minutes. The passage of time is nevertheless made evident in this image in the blurred numbers seen on the bedside digital clock. In these images, Morell also used a prism to change the orientation of his projections from upside down to right side up.

Image Copyright

© Abelardo Morell.