Hi, I’m Abe Morell I’m delighted to be here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
speaking about an old work of mine, an old friend who I haven’t seen in a while. This photograph I made in 1996.
I knew a guy whose brother owned a nice apartment on the east side with a great view so I contacted him.
This was an amazing place. It had just been sold and so it was empty and perfect, like a studio.
I wanted to in some ways own New York.
The New York that was in some ways frightening to me and I was unable to make sense of it.
New York City is really hugely important for me.
I arrived in Miami with my parents and sister in 1962.
Then my father got a job as a Super in New York City on West 69th Street.
New York was frightening at first, I had seen all those movies when I was a kid
of a New York scene with gangsters, but it was also a salvation in a city of ambition.
Things were happening there, so it was a very important. It was my my next home as it turn out and
I still look at it as the place that really saved me.
Camera obscura is any space, it could be a room or a box, with a small opening looking out into the world.
What happens with these dark interiors is that the image of the outside actually gets projected upside-down on the opposite wall.
It just comes in, there is no technical invention with it, it just came with the creation of the world.
I wanted to make pictures where I would make a room into a camera obscura where the image would be projected
on the opposite side and then make a picture of it.
To me, that’s what distinguishes this work from anything before it.
The way I made this picture was first of all to cover all the windows with black plastic to darken it.
Then on one of the windows, I made a hole about 3/8th of an inch, the size of a dime
and this came in and it was kind of astonishing.
I put the ladder in there, we used the ladder to hang plastic,
but I put the ladder in there to make it a little bit more interesting.
In fact, unconsciously I was referring to Fox Talbot who was the British inventor of photography.
He made the first photographs other than Daguerre.
In one of his pictures, there is a ladder in it, so it’s a small joke to ten people,
but it’s a reference to some of the earliest photographs where that ladder exists.
I feel rather proud that this picture is in here, especially being
in the mix of so many people who are heroes of mine.
It’s nice to also be represented as a Latino artist
who is making work that is not just in a ghetto of Latino artists.
I’d like to emphasis that. As much as I am a Cuban, I’m also a person with abstract ideas.
Those are not mutually exclusive.
It’s really important to represent everybody, even people who are supposed to be a certain ethnicity
showing a freedom to make work.
That’s also part of being Cubano and Latin American and human.