CLICK HERE to learn more and register for
In the Dark: Reflections on Two Decades of Night Shooting
a Zoom discussion with MJ SHARP
Thursday February 6th, 6-8pm

 

 

 

Nightscapes features a selection of landscape and still life photographs exploring MJ Sharp’s fascination with preserving the human relationship to night and darkness.

STATEMENT

I started photographing exclusively at night just over 20 years ago, and the drive to spend time in quiet, dark places and wait for them to reveal themselves feels even more relevant today. The “attention economy” is a concept that goes back over 50 years. Psychologist and economist Herbert Simon went on to posit that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” a societal ill that has exploded in the years since.

While a moonlit prehistoric quoit in Cornwall and a dimly illuminated botanical study in Durham would seem to have little in common, the focused attention they inspire is, in fact, quite similar. Long looking and the resultant long exposures produce a kind of intermediate reality that is not available in real time. I experience most of my subjects as dark and undifferentiated monochromes, but when I’m lucky, the alchemy of photography turns them into luscious and detailed scenes that invite immersion and contemplation.

ABOUT MJ SHARP

An East Tennessee native, photographer MJ Sharp has been happily based in Durham, North Carolina, for most of her adult life. She worked closely with writers and reporters on both short and longform journalism stories as the staff photographer and photography editor at the Independent in Durham for most of the 1990’s.  During much of that time she also freelanced regionally for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, PBS’s Frontline, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the Ford Foundation, among others.  She taught at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University from 2012 — 2022 and helped found the Duke Faculty Union. She has done personal art and documentary photography for the past twenty years, culminating in a Fulbright Scholar Award in 2021/2022 to the University of Exeter, UK, where she collaborated with nocturnal ecologist Dr. Kevin Gaston to explore the effects of light pollution. 

Her artwork is included in the collections of the Akron Art Museum, the Asheville Museum of Art, the Cassilhaus Collection, The Henry-Copeland Art Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission Art Collection (London), as well as many private collections. This is her second solo show at Craven Allen Gallery.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Click here for Frank Konhaus discussing MJ Sharp’s Outside Amarillo
Click here for Our Disappearing Darkness and Recreating Prehistoric Night, a lecture by MJ Sharp