Three bankers moved out of their offices high above LaSalle Bank’s main branch in the Loop for a few days last week so Abelardo Morell could turn their rooms into cameras.
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No one’s sure how or when the camera obscura was invented, but it’s been known since antiquity that when light passes through a small hole into a darkened room (or box), an inverted image of what’s outside appears on the opposite wall. The technique has been used by artists since the Renaissance and by scientists for far longer. All cameras invert the images they take in, but reflex cameras (the ones we’re used to) correct the orientation with mirrors.
Some of the most recent images in Morell’s series–which the Art Institute will exhibit this summer, and which Bulfinch Press, AOL Time Warner’s illustrated-book imprint, collected last year in Camera Obscura–were made in 2002 in Havana, where the dislocation between worlds inside and outside his rooms is extreme. Though the city’s in ruins, its streets filled with dilapidated cars from the 50s, its prerevolution buildings crumbling, the camera obscura softens the details and restores the city’s former elegance (and Morell’s own childhood memories)–then lays that illusion across the walls of decrepit rooms in apartments and public buildings.
He also plans to continue a series in which he’s been photographing money–part of an ongoing interest in print and printing (for many years he was occupied with photographing books). This may involve more favors from bankers. “I’m asking people who are in a position to show me lots of money,” Morell says. LaSalle Bank, which has a substantial photography collection, has been promised a print of one of his new photographs, an image of their walls to hang on those walls, the outside world draped across them like an upside-down curtain.
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