Following are reflections on Abelardo Morell's pictures. I saw all of them at a recent exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Domestic Pictures

In the late eighties, Abelardo Morell followed his young son around the house in an effort to understand what things look like from a child's point of view. It is from this that the adult imagination is revisited. These images often carry a quiet, curious nature which provokes thought unto the artist's intention.

One particular photograph I looked at for minutes before I thought I had soaked up its information. It is called Paper Bag. A perfunctory glance yields an open, paper grocery bag. When analyzing it with the theme the author intended, I noticed much more. It has a very menacing, foreboding connotation to it. Although I never held any fear for paper bags as a child, I can feel the emotion. Because of the photograph's exposure, (or because Morell extensively burned the print), the bag's inside is absolute black, like a dark, threatening hole. The picture itself carries a full contrast range, so the intense falloff is instrumental in creating the picture's mood.

One photograph I can relate to personally is Refrigerator, which portrays a very drab and un-childlike kitchen. On the frige's surface stick colored, letter magnets. While the image is black and white, the color of the magnets is implied by their contrast range and playful nature. A child would look not at the curling linoleum floor, but these magnets. I had these same magnets on my fridge as a child, and remember my family's culinary interests posed a constant threat to my fingers.

An interesting domestic still life is Two forks under water. It is an extreme close-up of two interlocking forks placed in a glass of water. Within this image is a plethora of scientific interest. For example, the cohesive properties of water's Hydrogen bonds make the forks "pull" on the water, and a ghost image of the forks is seen on the water's surface due to its index of refraction. The theme of curious imagery exists here.

In Shadow during Solar Eclipse, another scientific interest is present. What we so often do not realize is that shadows we see in everyday life are in the shape they are because of the Sun's spherical shape. During a solar eclipse, the Sun shines upon the earth as a crescent, and this shape becomes evident in the way trees filter sunlight. This picture captures the shadows of leaves in an obscure way, appearing like petals or fingernail clippings. Gaps in the leaves behave like tiny lenses.

In fact, this phenomenon has a lot in common with another aspect of Morell's work...

Camera Obscura

Literally, "dark room" in Latin, these images look at first to be digitally enhanced. To create this effect, a room is completely light-sealed. Then, a 3/8" opening is cut into the material covering a window, and what results is an upside-down, turned-around image of the outside world projected into the room. The amount of light filtered through is very small, and often an 8-hour exposure or more is required to expose the slow film required for grainless, large photographs. These photos can be eerie, being void of traffic, people, and all other signs of life because their movement isn't captured on the film. I took an hour-long exposure of downtown Chicago at night which was bustling with people, but only the static forms of buildings remain on the film.

In Camera Obscura Image Of Manhattan View Looking South In Large Room, Morell uses a large, almost vacant room as his medium. The projection is very striking, and holds quite a bit of visual information. You can tell the picture is taken from inside a skyscraper from the perspective. You can even tell what side of the street it's on. Given the time and effort needed to do so, you could find out exactly where this picture was taken.

In Camera Obscura Image of Boston View Looking Southeast in Conference Room, you can tell it too was taken from a skyscraper or aerial perspective. The buildings are much different from the Manhattan picture however, in that they are lower and produce a more flat terrain.

In Camera Obscura Image of Times Square in Hotel Roomyou are assaulted by the overwhelming visual activity of Times Square. Visa, Coke, and a myriad of unintelligible advertisements appear everywhere on the wall, and they blend oddly into the contours of room, into the slant on the ceiling, and the door.

Books, Maps, and Paintings

This series of photographs were taken often while Morell was commissioned by an art museum or otherwise adhering to a theme. These pictures in particular stray from the neat constructions of reality. They contain maps with twisted topography, books with unwholesome rifts in their pages, and paintings with warped themes.

In Tower of Babel by Bruegel, the ink of a picture on a page makes a negative-like image. This is done by viewing the book from an angle of view which lies close to the actual book. It reminds me of using the Sabattier effect, which is similar to solarization, because the picture still looks positive as well.

Perhaps my favorite example of the importance of medium, Dictionary is an image which thrives on its large format. It is the type of image which could be a thumbnail on the Internet to a library, but something of the angle of the book and the image's utter monstrosity make the entire picture oddly warped. If the picture were an 8 x 10 or even a 16 x 20, it wouldn't carry the effect it does in its double-poster size format.

Book of Proverbs for the Blind is a statement with certain irony in the form of a picture. A small channel of light is shining on a large book with raised letters, which has a Braille-like texture to it. The light most likely is symbolic of how the book gives the blind a sense of sight.

Map #1 is a crinkled map with unnatural terrain. The map is of the Alps and Germany, and the crinkles Morell has added are quite unnatural to the indigenous mountains. In a large, wide format, this picture is technically awesome. There is no grain whatsoever, and it has a width to height ratio much like film does. The blacks and whites are crisp, and the range is well layered.

Two Paintings Sharing an Archway; Gardner Museum is an amusing and very absurd shot. In this, two paintings were divided in half by their archways in the background. Then they are combined with the corresponding half of the other image. The pictures are Botticelli's The Tragedy of Lucretia, in which soldiers are mourning over the dead body of Lucretia, and The Annunciation, by Piermatteo d'Amelia. What results is a composite of the pictures in which the virgin Mary looks piously into a book as the dead body of Lucretia lies across from her, when she is supposed to be informed by Gabriel of good news. A soldier pops out of the seam holding a sword, in an obscene, twisted way...