Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of Courtyard Building, Lacock Abbey, 2003, 50.8 x 60.8 cm (Fox Talbot Museum, Wiltshire) © Abelardo Morell
Abelardo Morell is known for artworks that employ the language of photography to conjure visual surprise and wonder. In this image, we see double: the stone gothic architecture is both right-side up and the room’s view of it is upside-down. We are inside and outside at once. Morell used a camera obscura both to make this room strange and unfamiliar and to reference the origins of photography itself. But it’s not any old room: Morell made this image in Lacock Abbey, the home of one of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot. In subject matter and technique, it is a meditation on the magic of photography.
What is a camera obscura?
The principle of the camera obscura (Latin for “dark room”) has been known since antiquity: namely, that light passing through a small aperture in a darkened chamber will project an upside-down, reversed image of the scene outside on the opposite wall. The basis for all photography, the camera obscura can be a room or a small, hand-held box—today’s camera. The simplicity of this natural phenomenon makes it no less wondrous. As Leonardo da Vinci wrote of it: “Who would believe that so small a space could contain the image of all the universe? O mighty process!” [1]
Diagram of a camera obscura in Gemma Frisius, De Radio Astronomico & Geometrico Liber… (1545; photo: HathiTrust)
Combining art, science, and a sense of magic, the camera obscura could turn the world into a picture (the image appears to viewers like an inverted movie projected in color upon the far wall). For centuries, the camera obscura was deployed as an optical toy or educational tool, but as 19th-century inventors began the chemical experiments that would become known as photography, they strove to fix—on paper, glass, or metal—its fleeting images.
Many years later, Morell employed the camera obscura to vividly demonstrate this fundamental technique for his photography students. In a cavernous classroom, he covered all the windows with black plastic and assembled his class in a semi-circle. He then poked a three-eighths-inch hole in the plastic, and the students invariably gasped in amazement to see buses running along the ceiling and pedestrians walking upside-down: the ordinary scene outside rendered extraordinary.
Turning rooms into cameras
Although Morell used the camera obscura to explain photography, it was some time before he began using it to make photographs. He first tried it at home, while on sabbatical in 1991. As with his classroom, he covered the windows of his bedroom with black plastic and poked a small hole. Morell then brought a large-format view camera on a tripod inside the room to record the strange juxtapositions that occurred when the outside world was projected onto a domestic interior. He eventually figured out that an exposure of six to eight hours was required, which eliminated all moving things (people, cars) from a scene and rendered objects that moved slightly (the leaves on a tree, for example) as a blur. In those early experiments, he said, “I felt that I had touched on something very important: that the very basics of photography could be potent and strange.” [2]
The camera obscura successes in his home launched an intensive series that would last decades and span the globe. Throughout the series, Morell found new meanings in the dialogue between architectural interiors and the world outside. Although the pictures are emptied of people (both inside and out) because of the long exposure time, a lingering human presence is invariably discernible in the interiors—Morell includes crumpled sheets and pillows or personal effects in a home, and often moves furniture or other items to break the plane on which the outside image is projected. As an eight-hour exposure compressed onto a single piece of film, the picture is part record, part abstraction. The combination of presence and absence, the normal and the strange, lends the photographs an air of the uncanny—what Sigmund Freud defined as the simultaneously familiar and foreign. [3] This disorienting effect, both uncomfortable and pleasurable, appeals to the artist, who likes the thought that an empty space may not be truly empty, that the world enters and infuses even the most isolated spaces.
William Henry Fox Talbot and Lacock Abbey
Morell was (and remains) fascinated by the early history of photography, and he made a pilgrimage to Lacock Abbey, where he produced two camera obscura works. The polymath Talbot—an expert in spheres of knowledge as varied as mathematics, chemistry, Egyptology, botany, and art history—was an ideal model. “I want my photographs to reflect a time when science, art, philosophy, and religion were closer brothers and sisters, as they were during Fox Talbot’s time,” Morell has stated. [4] Talbot’s innovations in photography were born from his own frustration with both the camera obscura and the camera lucida, a related optical device, as drawing aids, so Morell’s approach is particularly resonant as an homage to photography’s invention. (A younger generation might see a different kind of magic here; Lacock Abbey was filmed for some scenes of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies.)
The jumbled scene in Morell’s Camera Obscura Image of Courtyard Building may be confusing as the interior and exterior merge in opposite orientations. Soon, a logic takes hold: the elements that are upright—the door, the column, the ceiling arches—represent the interior, and those that are upside-down—gothic arches, paned windows, a shingled roof—comprise the courtyard outside. A chair and a music stand—left or placed there by the photographer—disrupt the flat plane of the wall and cast their own shadows. Brighter areas appear, one marking the sky from the scene outside, and another outlining the door in an accumulation over the hours of a small but insistent leak of light from beyond the room.
On the nature of photography
Morell’s rooms are never blank screens; their architectural forms and human furnishings alter, frame, and distort the view beyond the windows. The photographer makes a number of choices in his camera obscura photographs, selecting the room, the view, and the position of the pinhole. He also often intervenes in the scene, rearranging furniture or moving smaller objects. His camera obscura works offer a metaphor for all photography: even science—here, the optical principle made apparent with the simple tools of black plastic and a small hole—is subjected to art (or artifice). These seemingly pure photographs are, in fact, highly constructed. They thus explicitly mediate—as all photographs do, if perhaps less obviously—the objective and the subjective, the natural and the cultural. This camera obscura image of Talbot’s home is a particularly potent reminder of this, using photography’s most basic and primal means to evoke photography’s magic, even as we are reminded that photographs are always interpretations.
