Camera Obscura by Abelardo Morell, made from 1991 to 2022 in rooms across the United States, Italy, France, England, and Cuba, photographs exterior scenes projected into domestic, institutional, and other interiors.
The series grew from camera-obscura demonstrations Morell used in mid-1980s classrooms at Massachusetts College of Art. During a 1991 sabbatical, he enlarged the principle from a cardboard box to rooms in his Quincy, Massachusetts, home. Bringing public views into private spaces, the project examines perception, image and reality, domesticity, and photographic optics. Morell framed its premise as photographing "what a room sees".
Each photograph overlays a projected street, skyline, landscape, or monument onto walls, beds, curtains, floors, furniture, and paintings. Early black-and-white images show exterior scenes upside down across quiet, seemingly vacant rooms, flattening distant architecture and nearby objects. Long exposures register changing light but often erase passersby, as in the two-day Times Square exposure of 1997. Later color works, sometimes corrected upright with a prism, give interiors and projections more equal visual weight. The spaces remain recognizable yet spatially unsettled.
For the first pictures, Morell sealed windows with black plastic, cut a small aperture, and aimed a tripod-mounted 4 × 5 Sinar view camera at the opposite wall. Using 400 ISO Kodak black-and-white sheet film, he exposed for five to ten hours. He later added a focusing lens or custom diopter for brighter, sharper projections, introduced color, and used a prism to change orientation. Digital capture reduced exposures to a few minutes, allowing clouds and moving shadows to register. The resulting objects include gelatin-silver and inkjet prints.
The project entered public view in 1993 through exhibitions in Santa Fe and New York, followed by the Smithsonian book A Camera in a Room in 1995 and the monograph Camera Obscura in 2004. MoMA included the 1994 Empire State Building photograph in New Photography 10. Camera-obscura works were central to the traveling retrospective Abelardo Morell and the Camera Eye from 1998 to 2002, the Art Institute of Chicago's A View with a Room in 2005, and The Universe Next Door at the Getty and High Museum in 2013–14. Prints are held by institutions including MoMA, SFMOMA, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art.
