MJ Sharp—Artist Statement

Visions de Nuit, Espirit D'Avant, 12/2009 (click here for article with photographs)

I've been a documentary photographer for over two decades, but starting around the turn of the millennium, I found myself drawn to a very specific subject matter: endangered, night-dwelling animals. I photographed baby sea turtles along the southeastern coast of North America who hatch at night and use the moonlight's reflection on the water to guide them to the sea, something that is getting harder and harder for them in modern times as they mistake the lights of town for the moonlight on the ocean. I also shot a story on a bat census being conducted in my area of the southeastern U.S. Both stories involved misunderstood, rarely-glimpsed creatures whose eons of adaptation to their environment were suddenly no match for human-inflicted habitat destruction.

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 in the middle of the night with a large-format bellows camera, recording this alternate reality of flowers. Later I began to expand my scope to include larger landscape scenes and interior domestic scenes either at night or in very low light (at dusk, for example). Scenes that were already touching in some way became even more poignant when it took hours for enough light to build up on the film to make the exposure. The photograph that resulted always had a haunting quality of light because, in fact, it was impossible to "see" the scene that way in real time. It only existed after long build-up of light on the light-collecting emulsion of film. The photographing itself became a way to meditate on and stay with objects and spaces that had outlived their daytime usefulness in some way; to notice the discarded; to take time to sit with and really see the beauty in what was moving along at its own pace, in its own time, for its own ends.

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