Born in Havana, Abelardo Morell emigrated to the United States in 1962 where he took his first photography course after winning a scholarship to Bowdoin College, a small liberal arts college in Maine. There, Morell experimented with a variety of experimental techniques to create surreal effects that reflected his feelings of alienation as a Cuban living abroad. He continued on to the graduate programme at Yale University, where he worked within Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand's tradition of black-and-white street photography. In 1983, he began teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where he remains a professor today.

Cuban-born Abelardo Morell (b.1948) began photographing his domestic environment after the birth of his son in 1986. Considering the world from a child's point of view, he photographed household objects from surprising perspectives to produce unfamiliar and disconcerting results that challenge the viewer’s perception of reality. Morell continues to take photographs that explore reality and illusion and has created images with books, money, maps and paintings as their subject, alongside his best known series of camera obscura photographs.