Abelardo Morell '77 is transforming the way people look at the world, one photograph at a time.
Though the renowned photographer now travels the world to take pictures and explore new ways to use them, his career as an artist started at Bowdoin.
Morell arrived in the United States from Cuba in 1962. He came to Bowdoin in 1969 speaking broken English. Photography allowed him to cross the linguistic divide.
"When I was at Bowdoin, I was still pretty young and my language was not great," he said. "But I had kind of an urge to express stuff in pictures."
He took a photography class from now-retired Associate Professor of Art John McKee and found his passion.
"Without him, I don't think I would have become a photographer," Morell said of McKee. "He basically saw that I had a little talent and gave me a green light. He was trusting of what I was doing and that was really important."
Although Morell cites McKee as his mentor, McKee hesitates to accept the credit.
"I didn't teach him anything. He came with it. He has it. He knows, he sees, and he does," McKee said.
Still, McKee taught Morell much about the elements in photography that crossed boundaries into other areas of art.
"He played music, read literature, and showed how photography was embedded in a lot of other interesting stuff," Morell said. "It was a really neat way of learning. Instead of closing a door, it opens a window. It was interesting to have the creative element of photography linked to other ways of expression."
And Morell has been opening windows ever since.
He graduated from Bowdoin in 1977 and received a Master of Fine Arts in 1981 from the Yale School of Art. His work has been on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum, all in New York, and abroad. He received an honorary Doctorate of Arts from Bowdoin in 1997. He currently teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Last year, a documentary about his life, "Shadow of the House," premiered in Boston.
He is best known for a process called camera obscura?Latin for "dark chamber." It involves covering all the windows of a box or room with dark plastic. He then makes a small hole, half an inch in diameter, which produces an upside down image of the outside into the room or box. The development process takes between six and eight hours and results in a clear picture on the wall of the room or box opposite the hole.
Currently, he is creating camera obscura photographs in color and reversing images so that they are now right-side up.
"Color changes everything," Morell said. "The idea of the world looks more like the real thing. The whole thing is becoming a little more naturalistic. It looks more normal in a way but is still quite weird," he said.
Morell has also started scanning his negative film, which allows him to print inkjet photographs, some of them as large as four by five feet. Many of these prints are on display at his latest show in New York at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery. It includes a picture of Central Park that he took last summer.
Morell is now waiting for fall to set in at the park so that he can take another picture from the same perspective.
"I'm waiting for the colors to change so I can do the same apartment in the fall, then the winter, then the spring," he said.
Monet's serial paintings of the Rouen Cathedral inspired Morell to undertake the project.
"One subject can say many things depending on the weather and time," he said.
The show in New York also features Morell's photographs of money?much of which he traveled to a Swiss bank to photograph. In one image, he photographed gold bars worth $79 million.
"It's interesting to portray the fantasy in photography, the tactile thing," he said.
The next set of pictures in the show comprise his work as an artist-in-residence at the Yale University Art Gallery.
"They asked me to react to the place," he said.
Morell was interested in the idea of art being photographed, and in some cases, asked the curators to move sculptures closer to paintings so that the two pieces looked as if they are part of the same work when he photographed them.
Finally, Morell created cliché verre, or "glass picture," prints. Cliché verre was a method developed in the 1850s by artists after photography was invented.
"I thought I'd update it a little," Morell said. He covered glass with ink that, when it dried, cracked in abnormal ways.
"Once it dried, I carved out the shape of the continents," he said. "The next process was to take that glass thing and in the dark room, sandwich it with photographic film so I can get a negative of that glass. Once I get that negative, what I print becomes a positive."
Assistant Professor of Art Michael Kolster met Morell at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design during the early 1990s and has been a friend and fan since.
"The purpose of a liberal arts educations is to view a variety of subjects through different lenses and look for possible connections between them. I think Abe's work is an exemplar of that kind of thinking," he said. "He doesn't have preformed ideas but he has an extremely rich engagement with his process."
According to McKee, the process is innate in Morell's being.
"It's in his nature to see things, to notice things?things which many of us overlook."