Camera Obscura: Boston's Old Custom House In Hotel Room, Boston, Ma
In this striking image by Abelardo Morell, the exterior architecture of Boston's Old Custom House is projected upside down onto the walls and surfaces of a hotel room through the camera obscura technique. The collision of the bustling outdoor cityscape with the intimate interior space creates a dreamlike and disorienting duality, blurring the boundary between public and private worlds. Morell's masterful use of light transforms the ordinary hotel room into a living canvas, merging two distinct realities into a single, seamless composition.
- Location
- Sotheby's, New York, NY
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Sotheby'sView on map
🔨 Auction Lot
Contemporary Photographs
September 27, 2019
Estimate: $4,000 to $6,000
Lot 6
Spotted works by Abelardo Morell
Artists in conversation
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Japanese · b. 1948
Sugimoto's long exposure photographs of theaters and architectural spaces share Morell's fascination with light as a transformative force and the blurring of time within interior spaces, creating similarly dreamlike and conceptually layered black and white images.
Vera Lutter
German · b. 1960
Lutter converts rooms and shipping containers into giant camera obscuras to project and photograph urban architecture directly onto photosensitive paper, making her practice nearly identical in concept and visual outcome to this specific Morell technique.
Michael Wesely
German · b. 1963
Wesely uses extreme long exposure photography to merge architectural exteriors with interior spaces and time, producing surreal conceptual images where the boundary between outside urban environments and enclosed rooms dissolves in ways closely parallel to Morell's camera obscura work.
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