Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell is internationally renowned for images that employ the language of photography to explore visual surprise and wonder. His commission was initiated to coincide with a retrospective of his vast and varied career at the High in 2014. In the months leading up to the exhibition, Morell pursued two threads of inquiry, both of which relish in Atlanta’s distinctive foliage and depict the city’s environs with a dislocating sense of magical realism.

While he has experimented with many photographic techniques, Morell is best known for his use of the room-sized camera obscura, an ancient optical device comprising a darkened room with a small opening on one side that allows him to project exterior views onto interior spaces. Continuing this ongoing series, he created images of the Atlanta skyline that foreground the canopy of trees that envelopes the city and overlaid it on offices, hotel rooms, and domestic spaces. The images thus conflate inside and out, public and private, natural and humanmade.

To complement his views of the skyline, Morell used mirrors, frames, curtains, and posters to make oblique and visually confounding representations of the trees and other plant life around Atlanta. Inspired by the tradition of Southern Gothic literature, he wanted these “living collages” to have a familiar but puzzling quality. “The strangeness, the disjointedness of it comes from very real things,” he recalled. “It’s not manipulated. It’s put together from real objects, real surfaces, real backgrounds. It’s encouraging to see strangeness come out of what we all know.” His pictures offer jarring perspectives and fictional interjections that playfully subvert traditional representations of pastoral beauty. In doing so, the images remind us that photography’s power to expand our perception of the world lies not so much in what it represents but in how it represents the world.

View all works in the commission.