This book is a  collection of wonderful images. 
Just over 50 black & white photographs, the majority of which are reproduced at 26cmx21cm.
  Morell has travelled the world to produce these simple but stunning shots.  He blacks out all the windows of a room, leaving just a pinhole opening in one window.  The outside world is projected upside down within the room.  In this way you are put inside a camera obscura.  He then photographs the interior with a large format camera.  What you see are extraordinary juxtapositions:  the Empire State building stretching across a bedspread; the Eiffel Tower plunging down the wall of a Parisian hotel room; a Tuscan landscape providing an upside-down wallpaper above the beds in a grand Florentine bedroom.

In Afterword Morell writes, ” Looking back at this camera obscura project, I’m struck by the continuing pleasure, energy, and surprise that the images still provide me.  I am convinced that this is due in large part to the way these photographs are tied up with the excitement I felt during my own beginnings in photography – a time for me when the world I photographed seemed charged with new possibilities, strangeness, and hope.”

In the introduction to Morell’s photographs, Luc Sant writes, ” Morell’s photographs capture the camera obscura in its most primal form…..Other photographers working today have employed the device as an instrument, but their pictures show only the results, tightly framed and right side up; as far as I am aware, Morell is unique in rendering the process in its complete setting, thus bringing out the full strangeness of the experience.  The outside comes inside, unaltered and unabridged but wrenched out of contextby the apparently simple matter of being turned upside down.”

Available from Amazon at around £30, this is a collection of photographs that you will return to again and again.

Recently received my order from Steve Gosling of his book of pinhole photographs.  Some 48 monochrome images, excellently reproduced at 17cm square. 

In his introduction Steve writes, ” I’ve never been overly concerned with technical perfection or producing an accurate pictorial record of a location. For me the heart of landscape photography is to capture and communicate what I’m feeling……”

I would like to add to that “and to evoke in the viewer an emotional/intellectual response.”  The majority of the images in the book are seascapes, an environment that awakens a range of responses in almost all of us.   For me the photographs convey a great sense of emptiness and of loss; the images are unpopulated, the locations deserted and yet the hand of man is everywhere – whether it is the rusting hulks of the once proud fishing fleets of the north-west or the storm-clad skies over the deserted symmetry of Victorian and Edwardian architecture.  Pinhole photography with its inherent softness complements perfectly the atmosphere created by these images – never more so than in Two Seats and Heavenly Light.

There are other images, a dozen or so, which do not feature man-made structures at all.  In most of them one element – a tree or a rock – is isolated within a sweeping and often threatening landscape.  These are not friendly environments but disturbing and unwelcoming and where light struggles with the dark. 

I must also own up to knowing many of the locations and so for me there is the emotional tie of memory associated with the Lake District, Fleetwood and Scarborough.  Nevertheless the images have a timeless quality and it does not require personal knowledge of the places to appreciate their quality and power to evoke “the eternal note of sadness”.  

This is a fine collection of photographs where technique supports content admirably and while there is always an element of chance in pinhole photography, the composition of these photographs is evidence enough of Steve’s mastery of technique and coherence of vision.  

At £30 it is not a cheap book but in my opinion a valuable addition to any photographic library, and especially as the images originate in a pinhole camera.