Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of the Piazzetta San Marco Looking Southeast in Office, pigmented inkjet print mounted on aluminum, image 23 7/16 x 30", 2007. Courtesy Abelardo Morell and Bonni Benrubi Gallery.

The columns on the Philadelphia Museum of Art, that façade made famous by the film Rocky, are upside down. Hovering nearby is a de Chirico painting, The Soothsayer’s Recompense, and to the left of that is a mundane chair. This strange composite image is the work of Abelardo Morell, the Boston-based photographer and Massachusetts College of Art professor.

The Philadelphia picture is part of an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, Behind the Seen: The Photographs of Abelardo Morell, on view from June 24 to August 10. It features about forty of his works dating from 1991 to 2008—mysterious images that make books seem like mountains and landmarks, such as the Roman Coliseum, stand on their heads.

Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of Times Square in Hotel Room, gelatin silver print, sheet 32 x 40", 1997. Courtesy Abelardo Morell and Bonni Benrubi Gallery.

Upside-down imagery is one of Morell’s signatures. He achieves it through a camera obscura, one of the most primitive forms of photography, known at least since Aristotle’s time. He covers the windows of a room with black plastic, sealing off all light except for a single, small hole that effectively brings the outside world in, but upside down. He uses a large-format camera and exposures of eight hours or more to take the picture. The furnishings of the darkened room turn into dim echoes of their usual selves. Indoors and outdoors mingle, but Morell makes the room seem like a ghostly sanctuary where one gazes at the exterior world at a safe remove.

“I’m turning part of the Yale exhibition into a room-size camera obscura, framing that ugly Paul Rudolph building that’s being renovated,” he says. “I’m using a prism, so the image will be right-side up.” (The brutalist Rudolph building, part of Yale’s architecture school, is being transformed by architect Charles Gwathmey.)

People who have followed Morell’s career of thirty-plus years are familiar with the camera obscura works. The surprise in the Yale show is that the most recent works, including spectral views of Venice, are in color—they’re pigmented inkjet prints. Color is not a quality associated with Morell, who has built his considerable reputation on black-and-white images. “I guess it’s my conservatism and old-fashioned-ness,” he explains about his love of black and white. “As a kid, I made color photography,” he says, “and I returned to it in 2005.”

The show also introduces a new series of photographs of paintings. “I’ve always loved painting,” Morell says. “I’m jealous of painters, so my work has become more painterly. I actually took a painting class at Bowdoin,” where he went to college, “and it was really humbling. I spent the entire semester doing one little still life of a bowl and a couple of bananas.” He adds that as a child, “I couldn’t even draw decently. All my people were stick figures.”

Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of Windows in Gallery with Hopper Painting, Whitney Museum, gelatin silver print, sheet 20 x 24", 2003. Courtesy Abelardo Morell and Bonni Benrubi Gallery.

Morell is not the only photographer to find subjects in traditional museum galleries. The German artist Thomas Struth and Americans Doug and Mike Starn have used artworks hanging in galleries as material for their work. They, however, include spectators, and those viewers increase the sense of the bustle in museums. Morell’s photos are hushed meditations on individual works of art. “I want my art to meet other art,” he explains. “I wanted to make something surreal,” he says of “The Rocky,” as he jokingly calls the Philadelphia picture, “something with strange classical references.”

Morell had the run of the Yale galleries to create his strange juxtapositions in preparation for the show. “I had ten guys moving things around for me,” he says with a chuckle. One result, called simply Rinehart/Inness (he’s not one for fancy titles), features George Inness’s atmospheric 1857 landscape Lake Nemi, combined with William Henry Rinehart’s 1869 pure white marble sculpture Sleeping Children. The two works individually are examples of nineteenth-century sentimentality and nostalgia for antiquity. Morell’s combination gives them an enigmatic quality. And by placing Elie Nadelman’s white marble Classical Head (1917) with Edward Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea (1951), he effectively turns Hopper into a surrealist. “I had a Nadelman and a Hopper becoming a de Chirico,” he says.

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