Flowers for Lisa: A Delirium of Photographic Invention

Best known for his surreal camera obscura pictures and luminous black-and-white photographs of books, photographer Abelardo Morell now turns his transformative lens to one of the most common of artistic subjects, the flower. The concept for Flowers for Lisa emerged when Morell gave his wife, Lisa, a photograph of flowers on her birthday. "Flowers are part of a long tradition of still life in art," writes Morell. "Precisely because flowers are such a conventional subject, I felt a strong desire to describe them in new, inventive ways." With nods to the work of Jan Brueghel, Édouard Manet, Georgia O'Keeffe, René Magritte, and others, Morell does just that; the images are as innovative as they are arresting.

"Abelardo Morell's Flowers for Lisa makes love visible. His photographs have always reached for a new kind of vision and here it is, a completely original point of view, transforming and mysterious and nothing less than fantastic."
-Alice Hoffman, author of Practical Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, The Dovekeepers, and The Rules of Magic


"Astonishingly beautiful-simply jaw-dropping-a world of original wonders with a subject that one might have thought had been exhausted long ago."
-Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of How the Mind Works and Enlightenment Now

"The astonishing images in Flowers for Lisa, with their painterly explosions and surprising deconstructions, refract the world anew. Morell has captured the paradoxical: the essence of the things themselves (in this case, flowers as you've never seen them before); and the ineffable, tactile, full complexity of love. Bravo!"
-Cristina García, author of Here in Berlin