Camera Obscura
As the world of photography grows ever more digitized, Morell offers a glorious and surprising reminder of its classical roots. The well-known Cuban-born photographer essentially turns a room into the interior of a camera. He blacks out the windows, leaving a pinhole opening in one of them. Because of the nature of refracted light, the scene outside the window is projected upside down into the dim room. Morell then captures the room on film with a large-format view camera; exposures can take eight hours or more. The juxtapositions in the book's 60 duotones are eerily beautiful: New England clapboard houses hang serenely on the walls of a child's bedroom strewn with toy dinosaurs; Times Square throws a patchwork over the walls and bed of a Manhattan hotel room; the cityscape of Havana spreads across the crumbling interior wall of an apartment.Editors of Scientific American