“Things are not always what they appear to be,” says Cuban
American photographer Abelardo Morell. Shadow of the
House peers into his past and around the corners of his pres-
ent to see what normally goes unseen. This film is a rare look
into the life of one of America’s renowned photographers.
A feature length film, Shadow of the House explores how
Morell uses his art to make sense of a life up-ended by geo-
graphic, cultural, linguistic, and political dislocation. It is an
intimate portrayal of how one man’s personal struggle with
the themes of loss, exile, and self-determination reflects the
ways in which we all work to construct narratives that unite
the past with the present and memory with desire. Morell has
used this tension to fuel a career as a remarkable artist.
Morell’s life is utterly ordinary on the surface but our under-
standing of him deepens as layer after layer of the man and
the impact of his experiences are revealed: his strange and
compelling flight from Castro‘s Cuba in the early sixties, his
adolescent years in New york City; his life as an American
family man and photographer who is more comfortable
working at home but whose career increasingly pulls him into
the larger world.
Morell’s artistic process is central to the film. The film makes
public the often unglamorous work that precedes the beau-
tiful photographs — the laborious process of finding locations
and setting up rooms and the frustration of failed images.
The film reveals the all-consuming nature of his drive to make
images, despite what may be going on around him.
Morell has gained international acclaim for his elegant, large
format, black-and-white camera obscura photographs that
turn the world upside down and marry the inside with the
outside, and for his photographs of everyday images from
his domestic milieu. When Morell creates a photograph, he
mirrors back a transformed space: a paper bag becomes a
haunting void; the ocean fills a room; Alice crawls out from
within the pages of her Wonderland. The results are photo-
graphs of objects we think know, presented in ways that
make us question what we know.
Working alone, the director of Shadow of the House filmed
Morell and his family for over 7 years both at home and
abroad. During the filming, Morell returns to Cuba for the first
time since his escape in 1962. This decision, and the intense
anger and fear it arouses in his family, forces him to wrestle
with his sense of identity, familial allegiance, and cultural pol-
itics. Shadow of the House explores the intersection between
these issues and Morell’s idiosyncratic artistic vision.
In Morell’s words, “A lot of my work tries to disorient you once
you get invited in to something that seems normal. I like to
suggest that what may be empty is not. When you feel
alone there is actually a lot more of the world coming into
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