From Our Archives: Abelardo Morell: The Cuban Missile
Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: View of Valle de Viñales, Pinar del Rio, Cuba, 2014.
This interview was featured in Issue No. 15 - Place
AB: What’s the process like now? You say it’s changed radically, so how has it changed?
AM: So the beginning pictures from ’91 were just basically me darkening the whole room with dark plastic and then I would make a small hole, like 3/8ths of an inch looking out. So, a very dim image of the outside showed on the opposite wall. It wasn’t super bright, so those lm pictures just took a lot of exposure to get them right. Some of them, like I said, were 8 hours long. Over time I’ve developed ways to get the image brighter by getting a lens made that will focus on the distance of that wall, not only brighter, but sharper. Then I found ways to invert the image so instead of them being always upside-down, I can turn them right side up. I’ve shot in color, and recently—well the last 5 or 6 years—I’ve been using a digital camera. So the 5-8 hour exposures are now 3-5 minutes long. So it’s changed radically.
AB: I have to tell you, the whole thing just doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m a photographer! So I don’t understand how you use a digital camera for your method; I don’t get it!
AM: Well my digital camera is just like a film camera, except it’s got a digital back. And what happens with digital technology is that film has something called reciprocity, which means that when the light is low level, film doesn’t react to light in a regular way. It just takes a lot longer for it to receive these photons of energy. So, if your meter says 2 minutes, it’s more like 2 hours. Digital technology doesn’t have any of that reciprocity—just, what it is, is what it is. It tends to get it a lot faster. The nice thing about that is that now, in my pictures, I can get clouds, I can even get people to show up. So there’s a certain momentary feeling of time, and I think that’s really helped a lot.
AB: You describe much of your camera obscura work as “painterly.” Aside from your project after Monet, which other painters have influenced you?
AM: Well, I’m a closet painter in a way. I don’t know how to paint, but I love looking at painting. And of course, photography grew out of painting, so you name it. The current project that I’d like to talk to you about is Monet, but when I was a teenager in New York City, I went to MOMA a lot, and I loved the surrealists, Magritte and de Chirico and people like that. But then Picasso and all those modernists became very important to me, and to this day my studio is mostly full of art books, which I constantly look at and I’m constantly trying to find some avenue to combine some of my painterliness into my work.
AB: Your work is the intersection of different worlds, whether it is indoors and outdoors in the case of your camera obscura series, or two-dimensional and three-dimensional with your Alice in Wonderland series. What about exploring the intersections of seemingly separate worlds appeals to you?
AM: That’s a good question. Maybe it goes back to that issue of being a young immigrant in New York, in the sense that I was definitely not in that world, I definitely felt separate, you know? I don’t mean in a discrimination kind of way, but just that that world was not mine. And that sense of maybe breaching or getting to know this other side has been with me a lot; that sense of overcoming the distance. I think in some ways the New York pictures, the camera obscura pictures, are very much about a young man who was overwhelmed by a city. Now in some ways, I’m making more private New York City pictures—understanding what I didn’t understand before.
AB: Well, although your works are all combined elements of reality, are you at all influenced by fantasy?
AM: I don’t think so. No, I’m more in tune with the real being quite complicated. The way that the magical realism and Latin American literature suggest that the real is quite crazy. The fantasy part can lead to a kind of wishy-washy softness that I’m not interested in. I like Magritte very much because his paintings are of very normal things, a door, a chair, an apple. So the reality of that is really interesting. When you make something that common into something strange, I think it feels more earned as an artist than just making up unicorns.
AB: Which thoughts or emotions do you hope to provoke in your viewers when they look at your work? Do you consider that?
AM: Well of course. I always have an audience in mind. I’m not a mad person who doesn’t know what they’re doing (laugh). I’m not a primitive artist in that sense. I do have trouble with the fact that I’m showing them something that they’ve seen before, but through a different mirror, a different conduit. And I like surprising people with what they know, seen in a different light. To me that’s the most fun.
Abelard Morell, Camera Obscura: Afternoon Light On The Pacific Ocean, Brookyngs, Oregon, July 13th, 2009.
AB: Many photographers say that the benefit of photography is its quickness, and with that it allows for more happy accidents. Do you ever have accidents?
AM: Basically, with my pictures, I see exactly what’s happening. But yes, accidents happen all the time. When I make a two-minute exposure, I don’t know that a man is going to stand for two minutes on the sidewalk and show up. I don’t know that the light suddenly will change and give something a glittering look or something. Now it feels like I’m definitely welcoming chaos and chance and randomness a lot more than I used to. Maybe it’s my old age or something.
AB: Yeah you’re very old (laughs). You describe photography as a language, and your preferred language. How do images succeed for you where words fail?
AM: Well, images and words are such different animals. But I think, paint it right or photograph it right, sometimes I would even say it’s better than the real thing. Because it solves a certain problem of being that is separate from real life. When you see a painting that shows an emotion or moment, there’s a certain intelligence that art brings to life. That when it’s right, it shows the moment at its best.
Read the rest of the article in Musée Magazine's Issue No. 15 - Place
