Abelardo Morell uses photography to reveal strange, even magical, qualities of the physical world that human vision alone is unable to grasp. In 1991, he turned his living room into a camera obscura and has since transformed additional rooms into this kind of archaic camera. He covers windows with black plastic but cuts a 3/8-inch hole, or aperture, that allows a narrow stream of light to project an upside-down image of the outside world onto an interior wall. Morell then creates a dream-like exposure by allowing light to penetrate through this opening for eight hours. The resulting photographs appear surreal, combining normally sequential views of the world into a single image. His pictures depend on chance as much as on strict calculation, incorporating unpredictable elements like weather and passersby. Every change in light or movement in front of the aperture adds a facet to the composition. Using this process, Morell made this photograph during his first trip back to Cuba, forty years after his family immigrated to New York in exile from Fidel Castro’s government. Its subject is La Giraldilla, a bronze figurine on the watchtower of the old stone fort, Castillo de la Real Fuerza, which rises above the Havana harbor. Here the camera obscura technique inverts the iconic civic symbol as if we were seeing it reflected in water and merges it with crumbling plaster and tile walls inside a humble, unknown building.