In 1987, the year his son Brady turned two, Abelardo Morell lay down on the nursery floor in order to see the world the way a wriggling baby would. From that vantage point he looked up at a stack of blocks towering over him as if it were a BCE column or stele, and he took a photograph. In 1993 when Brady was six or seven, Morell looked up at a wine glass sitting on the kitchen table, seeing it approximately the way that his son would have then, and saw that the glass full of liquid was acting as a lens. The window beyond it was focused upside down and backwards, bending its frame to the curvature of the glass. So he took another picture. The next year, when he accidentally broke his glasses, snapping the frame in half at the bridge, he set up the two pieces on a table and took a picture of himself focused through the lenses of the broken glasses. In this photograph he sits with his eyes closed, as if dreaming about how the world would look without the usual modern enhancements of vision.

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