Abelardo Morell Abelardo Morell (American, b.1948) is one of the few
remaining contemporary artists specializing in the application of camera
obscura, an ancient photography technique that uses the obscura camera, a
square-shaped structure with a small aperture that permits light to penetrate
through the lens, in order to project inverted images from outside. The
technique was heavily employed by renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci
to aid in painting, and Morell uses it to capture amazing images of choice
locations around the cities of New York and Boston. Abelardo Morell was born
and raised in Cuba, but in 1962, at the height of the cold war, his family fled
to New York City, where he studied at Bowdoin College and graduated with a bfa
in 1977. In 1981, Morell received an mfa from Yale university school of art. He
dedicated the next 10 to 15 years of his career to camera obscura photography,
creating numerous impressive pieces that have been showcased extensively across
museums and art galleries in the United States.
In the early 1990s, his works were featured in publications
such as the Philip Morris Collection (1990), Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic
Comfort (1991), Fables of the Visible World (1992), andFeels Like Home (1995).
His sample images were exhibited in different museums and galleries, such as
the North Gallery in Boston (1988), The National Arts Club in New York City
(1993), the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York City (1994), and the Jan Abrams
Gallery in Los Angeles (1995). Morell's famous pieces from the 1990s include
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1998), A Camera in a Room (1995), and A Book
of Books (2002). His 2004 publication, Camera Obscura, features 60 of the
artist’s best photographs that he took using the ancient photography
technique.
In 2007, filmmaker Allie Humenuk made a documentary about the
life and times of this iconic photographer. Morell received an Honorary Doctorate
of Fine Arts from his alma mater in 1997. Prior to this, he was awarded
multiple fellowships from organizations such as the Cintas Foundation, John
Simon Guggenheim, and the New England Foundation. Morell is currently
Artist-in-Residence at the Alturas Foundation in South Texas.
Nacy Breslin Nancy Breslin is a fine art photographer who lives and works
in Washington, DC. After spending a decade as an academic psychiatrist, she
decided in 1997 to leave medicine to pursue a second career as an artist. She
completed an MFA at the University of Delaware in 2000 and received Individual
Artist Fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts in 2003 and 2008. She
has taught photography part-time at the University of Delaware and the Corcoran
College of Art & Design and in 2012-2013 was a visiting artist at Winterthur
Museum, Gardens and Library.
She has had solo shows at the Mezzanine Gallery, Agilent
Technologies Corporate Headquarters, Colourworks and the Grand Opera House
(Wilmington, Delaware); the Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, Virginia); the
Saint Joseph's University Gallery (Philadelphia); and the Delaplaine Visual
Arts Education Center (Frederick, Maryland). She has also had two-person
exhibitions at the Biggs Museum of American Art (Dover, Delaware), the Chris
White Gallery (Wilmington, Delaware), the Elkton Station Gallery (Elkton, Maryland)
and San Antonio College.
Her work has been published in a number of books, including
fotolog.book,The Book of Alternative
Photographic Processes by Christopher James (second edition), and Anthotypes:
Explore the Darkroom in your Garden, by Malin Fabbri, 2012. You can read about
her pinhole photography in the summer 2007 issue of the Delmarva Quarterly and
the fall/winter issue of Newark Life Magazine, and read an interview with her
by Erin Malone in Issue #3 of the online journal Without Lenses. Three images and a short bio are also
published in Volume 5 of the Tusculum Review (2009). Eleven images are
"showcased" in issue 15 of Light Leaks (a print journal of "low
fidelity photography"), pages 46 - 49 (fall, 2009).She was also interviewed in April 2010 at The
Pinhole Camera Blog. Ten images from her Amenities series are published in the
summer 2011 Square Magazine and three are in the book Play: Toy Camera
Photographers for Tots, published in December, 2011.
One of her toy camera images was selected from over 60,000
as a finalist in the Smithsonian Magazine 2012 photo contest. In October, 2012
she was the "photographer of the week" at 591photography.com. This
website (nancybreslin.com) was featured in the December 2012 issue of Shutterbug
(pages 28 and 30). She was interviewed about her pinhole work in the October
15, 2013 issue of the blog Top Photography Films and one of her gum over
cyanotype prints illustrates an article on alternative processes in the
November 2013 issue of Professional Photographer magazine. In February 2014 she
was interviewed online as a featured photographer at digitalab (New Castle,
UK).
Nancy Breslin's photography has been seen in over 60 group
shows, including exhibits at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the
Delaware Art Museum, the NJ Center for Visual Arts, the Maryland Federation of
Art, Nexus Gallery and Viridian Artists Gallery (NYC), Historic Yellow Springs
(PA) and Gallery Imperato (Baltimore). Her videos have been shown in Wilmington
and Dover (Delaware), Washington, DC and San Antonio (Texas). See exhibitions
for more information on where her work has been on view.