Abelardo Morell
[b. 1948, Havana, Cuba, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
It’s important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation—to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.
There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It’s getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn’t tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.
The thing that makes me want to make pictures now is just looking without many prejudices. The stuff right under your eyes is the most wonderful universe—if you care to look with young eyes.
...the very basics of photography [can] be potent and strange. So why not make pictures about the medium itself and see where they would take me?
I started making photographs as if I were a child myself. This got me to look at things more closely, more slowly, and from vantage points I hadn’t considered before.
Photography was so perfectly suited to my sensibility and situation, it gave me a voice, a kind of crazy, out-of-whack voice, at the beginning, but a voice. I could finally put into images bottled up feelings of absurdity and alienation—and also joy and delight.
A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don’t care where it’s going to go.
The spiritual aspect of my work has more to do with the sense that things in the world can be perceived and accepted as being in some respect alive. I try to approach everything that I photograph with this sense of wide-eyed awe.
