The Boston Globe, Wednesday, August 16, 2006, Living, Page 4

PHOTOGRAPHER WINS DECORDOVA’S RAPPAPORT PRIZE

By Geoff Edgers, Globe Staff

Abelardo Morell, a Brookline photographer whose work has been collected by numerous museums including the Museum of Fine Arts and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, has won this year's Rappaport Prize from the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln.

The $25,000 prize is the latest honor for the Cuban-born photographer, who is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and has won awards from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Cintas Foundation. Morell will give the DeCordova one of his photographs.

Morell, 57, is the first photographer awarded the Rappaport, which was given out for the first time in 2000. Past winners include sculptors Lars-Erik Fisk, installation artist Annee Spileos Scott, and painter Sarah Walker.

"He is an incredibly accomplished photographer, but it's not just that I like the way his photographs look," said Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, the DeCordova's director of curatorial affairs, by phone yesterday. "He has made a real contribution to understanding the medium of photography."

Morell's work was featured in the DeCordova Annual show in 1998, and his photographs are part of the museum's permanent collection.

In praising him, Lafo spoke of Morell's ability to use basic techniques, such as camera obscura photography, to produce new and unexpected perspectives.

"He takes the act of being, and kind of turns it on its head and reveals things to us that, at the base, are very simple, but somebody has to think of it and do it," she said.

When reached yesterday, Morell was working in his darkroom. "I'm trying to make photograms, sort of the most primitive way of making pictures without lenses: reflect light on the negatives in the dark," he said.

"The camera obscura itself is the idea of working with a very ancient system to feel as if I'm drinking from the same fountain a lot of other folks have. It's something true and ancient, and still, to this day, surprising."