In bed with the Brooklyn Bridge

Gallery stands at fairs like Paris Photo are inevitably limited in size, forced to give just a taste of what they have back at their HQ, so when we saw just one photograph by Abelardo Morell (a brilliant one of the Brooklyn Bridge projected on to a bedroom wall, no less) at Bonni Benrubi Gallery (C50) we just had to see more.

Morell, who took his first picture using camera obscura techniques in a darkened living room in 1991, doesn't need to carry a camera around with him when he travels, as the places he stays in become one. In his aptly named series Camera Obscura he turns hotel rooms, bedrooms and tents into huge cameras which project the outside scenes onto the inside walls.

"In setting up a room to make this kind of photograph, I cover all windows with black plastic in order to achieve total darkness" Morell says. "Then, I cut a small hole in the material I use to cover the windows. This allows an inverted image of the view outside to flood onto the walls of the room. I focus my large-format camera on the incoming image on the wall and expose the film, sometimes up to five to ten hours."

The project has taken him from his living room to interiors all over the world. "One of the satisfactions I get from making this imagery comes from my seeing the weird and yet natural marriage of the inside and outside."

Morell has evolved his techniques over the last two decades to produce the images you see now. "A few years ago, in order to push the visual potential of this process, I began to use color film and positioned a lens over the hole in the window plastic in order to add to the overall sharpness and brightness of the incoming image. Now, I often use a prism to make the projection come in right side up. I have also been able to shorten my exposures considerably thanks to digital technology, which in turn makes it possible to capture more momentary light. I love the increased sense of reality that the outdoor has in these new works .The marriage of the outside and the inside is now made up of more equal partners."

Click through the images to see more of Morell's Camera Obscura photographs and head over to the Phaidon.com Tumblr to see more photo updates from Paris Photo.