“Something is wrong with this picture,” Sam Abell said to his audience on May 9, during the final Photographers’ Lecture Series of the 2012-11 season.
Projected on the screen in the darkened Dodge Room was a photograph of two coffee cups on a tray and a glass of water. What was wrong? The audience strained to see.
Then the next slide appeared. Abell had turned the handle of a coffee mug, ever so slightly, to create a sliver of space between it and the shadow cast by the water.
Such small details have obsessed Abell throughout his long and illustrious career as a documentary photographer and on in-depth projects for National Geographic. As he noted in his artist’s statement, Abell “explores ways in which places can be purely recorded, with images simultaneously shaped by the photographer’s imagination.”
