Abelardo Morell
A monograph on the photographer who transforms everyday objects into magical images.Richard B Woodward

The first monograph to cover the complete career of Abelardo Morell (b. 1948)
Morell's photographs transform everyday objects into magical, ominous and mysterious images, through the use of surprising perspectives and angles that distort size and distance
Alongside many dramatic photographs, this book also features Morell's renowned 'camera obscura' series - including his earliest photographs taken while at college, images of his family, illustrations of a new edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and photographs that explore household objects, books, maps and paintings as their subjects

Born in Havana in 1948, Abelardo Morell emigrated to the United States in 1962, where, after winning a scholarship to Bowdoin College (a small liberal arts college in Maine), he took his first photography course. There, Morell experimented with a variety of photographic techniques to create surreal effects that reflected his feelings of alienation as a Cuban living abroad. He proceeded to complete the graduate programme at Yale University, where he worked within the framework of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand's tradition of black-and-white street photography. In 1983, he began teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where he remains a professor.

In 1986, Morell's fascination with his son engaged a new interest in this domestic environment as a subject. Morell began exploring the world from a child's perspective - approaching mundane household objects in a new way that challenges the viewer's perception of reality and how we see it. Morell transforms everyday objects by distorting angles and using extreme close-ups, and by exploiting perspectives that confuse and jar with our expectations.

This preoccupation with reality and illusion is most clearly realised in Morell's series of 'camera obscura' images (long exposure photographs in which the outside world is projected upside down along the walls of the room), his best known and most ambitious series. The distinction between the outside and the domestic world is merged and his