Scenes of Long Acquaintance

MJ Sharp

Bull City Arts Collaborative, Durham, North Carolina, March/April 2009

I've been a documentary photographer for quite a while now, but starting around the turn of the millennium, I found myself drawn to a very specific bailiwick: endangered, night-dwelling animals. I teamed up with writer Elizabeth Brownrigg to report on the sea turtles that hatch at night along the North Carolina coastline, sometimes mistaking the lights of town for the moonlight that is supposed to direct them safely to the water. Later we reported on a contingent of bat biologists as they gathered for their annual "Bat Blitz," a sort of Christmas Bird Count for the night-flying-mammal set. Both stories involved misunderstood, rarely-glimpsed creatures whose eons of adaptation to their environment were suddenly no match for human-inflicted habitat destruction.

Clearly, the unsuitability of the human environment was dominating my thoughts at that time, and what constituted "unsuitability" then began to enlarge in scope. There had been serious illness in my family, and seeing loved ones try to navigate the modern world when they were sick, weak, or frail, pointed a damning finger at the ruinous pace of it. Our efficient, fast-paced society began to feel very damaging, unhealthy, and suspect. There was no place for slow healing; no time for truth to ever-so-incrementally reveal itself. The day began to feel toxic. The night felt more honest. At night, everything was operating on its own time.

The first artwork I shot at night was daffodils, flowers that by day were utterly unflappable but by streetlight revealed their petals to be paper-thin, battle-scarred, and weary. It was a revelation. I spent an entire season lying about in flower beds at night. Later I would enroll in graduate school, expand my scope, and begin finding this slow, delicate mirror universe in larger scenes.
This most recent work, though superficially quite different, feels to me as though it's on exactly the same path as the previous night work: noticing the discarded, taking time to sit with and really see the beauty in what is moving along at its own pace, in its own time, for its own ends.