Discover the exquisite and unconventional floral still life images by acclaimed photographer Abelardo Morell

Photographer Abelardo Morell has a way of seeing familiar things in entirely new ways. He is best known for his luminous black-and-white photographs of books, treated as objects of aesthetic allure, and his camera obscura pictures—images made by allowing a pinhole of light into a darkened room and capturing the projected image of the world outside as a layered illusion on the interior. In this new body of work he turns his lens to one of the most familiar of artistic subjects, the flower, and through a series of optical and painterly interventions, creates images that are at once conventionally beautiful and subtly surreal.

The concept for Flowers for Lisa emerged after Morell gave his wife, Lisa, a photograph of flowers on her birthday, a gift far more lasting than the real thing. “I chose the subject of flowers because they are lovely,” Morell writes, “often exchanged between lovers—and they are part of a long tradition of still life in art. Precisely because flowers are such a conventional subject, I felt a strong desire to describe them in new, inventive ways.” With nods to the work of Jan Brueghel, Édouard Manet, Georgia O’Keeffe, René Magritte, Irving Penn, and Joan Mitchell, Morell does just that; the images are as innovative as they are arresting.

 

Abelardo Morell’s photographs have been collected and shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and more than 70 other museums worldwide. Lawrence Weschler is the award-winning author of True to Life (about David Hockney), Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, and Everything That Rises, among many other books.