ABELARDO MORELL AND THE CAMERA EYE

At the MFA

Through Apr. 11

During the 16 hours that Abelardo Morell's camera was trained on Times Square, thousands must have passed through the field of his lens. But not one is recorded. The city of his photograph is completely deserted, and the reason for this lies in Morell's famous and peculiar method of photography.

Morell's best-known series of photographs is based on the camera obscura (Latin for "dark room"). When a room is completely sealed against light except for a tiny hole, an inverted image of the world outside is projected onto the opposite wall. The pinhole camera works on this same principle of optics. Morell seals off the rooms of houses and hotels to make them into camera obscuras, and then sets up his camera inside the room, so as to capture the projected image, distorted by the furnishings of the chosen room, over the course of a long exposure of up to two days. The exposure is so slow that the passing pedestrians and traffic do not register at all.

Abelardo Morell and the Camera Eye, on view at the MFA through April 11, is the first major traveling exhibition of this contemporary photographer's work. Morell, born 1948 in Cuba, has concentrated for the past decade on several projects besides his camera obscura series; his domestic still lifes, his explorations of books, maps and paintings and his illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are also presented. All his photographs are large-format silver gelatin prints. His photographic technique is traditional, but he is nimbly inventive in his manipulation of the objects he chooses to photograph.

Until the mid-80s, Morell was a street photographer in the tradition of Robert Frank. He strolled through cities, hoping to capture the accidental compositions of the metropolis, chance photogenic oddities. With the birth of his son, Morell discovered the wonders of the domestic interior, the strangeness of objects--there was "a huge landscape of...things" to be investigated. Like a Columbus of the kitchen floor, Morell began to photograph cooking eggs, refrigerators, building blocks and realized that "you don't have to go to Tibet to find a great picture."

His new fascination with the beauty of surfaces, and unsuspected symmetries prompted studies such as "Two Forks Under Water" (1993). These photographs, the earliest in the exhibit, are the least interesting. But his decision to photograph the transformations of objects would pay off later. "From physicality," Morell said, "ideas emerge," and in the next series, I was delighted to see that yes, they do.

Morell's investigation of objects led him beyond his home and into museums and libraries. While his earlier photographs framed and isolated the driftings of his household, in this series he manipulated the objects to be photographed much more actively. In one of my favorites, "Dictionary" (1994), the lens peers up at the corner of the dictionary, and, isolated from details that might confess the scale, the book looms like Giza. Commenting on the print, Morell said, "I wanted to take a photograph where a dictionary looks like a pyramid, so I sat down and figured out how to do it."

This willful approach paid off; through visual puns and analogies, the photographs play with the physicality of objects--books, paintings, objets d'art--not usually thought of as wholly physical. Morell delights in the frame of an oil portrait, the ghost negative of light on a color plate viewed at the wrong angle, the way the curve of the page interrupts an engraving. His choice of objects, often the kind that might arouse an antiquarian's obscure joy, recall the contents of Joseph Cornell's boxes, but the mood is different, more curious than nostalgic.

The camera obscura series enchants with the sheer oddness of the resulting images, of skyscrapers bending at the angle where wall joins ceiling and three-deckers turned upside-down. Visual puns--like the Empire State Building, reclining suggestively across a hotel bed--sharpen the images. The very long exposures Morell used for these make for curious effects, such as the atomic radiance of the digital alarm clock in "Camera obscura image of Times Square in hotel room" (1997).

Morell's work is coolly and carefully playful, almost devoid of humans and human drama. His photographs are an object lesson in finding fascination in new places.