dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563
DURHAM – Taking pictures at night slows things down. Photographer MJ Sharp shoots not just at a decelerated time of day, but with longer exposure times, too. Her results are on exhibit in the Craven Allen Gallery on Broad Street through Jan. 28.
“Part of what it is, in the daytime the whole world is occupied physically, occupied with thoughts – everything is occupied. At night, people go from one lighted spot to another,” Sharp said. “In between is vacant, cleared out for something else.”
Night is emotionally restful, she said. Shooting scenes out in the world aren’t chosen during the day, but when she roams around at night. Her long exposure photographs are also set in kitchens, using refrigerator light, or watching a piece of decaying fruit for days for the right moment to shoot, like “Tiny Apple Core” and “Drowned Strawberry.” The kitchen sink was the stage for the photo “Beth Ann’s Ice,” which captures melting ice and its former home, a drinking glass.
Sharp’s still life photos are actually the opposite of still life, she said. “This work is really open to chance and happenstance,” Sharp said. The ice was a run and get the camera moment.
“Now I can’t shoot something I already know what it looks like. That’s where I’m living these days,” she said. Sharp’s life as a photographer was quite different more than a decade ago, when she spent the 1990s as a photojournalist for The Independent. After a serious family illness took her away from work briefly, she decided to phase it out and take a bigger step away from the hectic and harried work life that became toxic, she said. Over the next few years, she searched for who she was. The answers came in 2003 and 2004, at night.
She shot two freelance projects that involved bats and sea turtles at night. She’s a night person anyway. Then there was the night she noticed her daffodils starting to come up in her yard, lit only by a streetlight. A spark reignited.
Looking at the daffodils, Sharp was floored. “I knew the only way to shoot them was with a 4-by-5 [inch] camera. I hadn’t shot with a 4-by-5 in eight years,” she said. The large format, high resolution work that began that night produced a show in 2004. The images in this show date from 2004 to 2010.
John Craven Bloedorn of Craven Allen Gallery said he has been blown away by Sharp’s work and thinks the gallery space – underground, with an exposed brick wall – is an intimate space good for her work. The co-curator is art collector Frank Konhaus. Bloedorn said Sharp is a first rank photographer and he wants others to realize the quality of her work.
Spending time with a subject, looking longer, lets you see all kinds of details you normally wouldn’t see, according to Sharp.
“By virtue of it being this crazy long exposure, you see different things,” she said. For “Path to the Sea,” shot in Scotland, the exposure was three hours. “Solitary Sheep,” which shows the little white fellow amid the middle of the night greens and blues of the North Sea coastline, was exposed for an hour.
Colors “go really wonky” during long night exposures, Sharp said. “Concrete Tree,” of a tree in a parking lot, looked like it was lit neutrally to her eye, yet the film captured it as blue. The kinds of blues in photo backgrounds are different depending on the use of indoor warm light or outdoor daylight film.
The film wasn’t designed to stare at that kind of scene for an hour or two, she said. “It gets to be whatever it turned out to be,” Sharp said.
Tuesday evening, she’ll give an artist’s talk at Craven Allen Gallery and set up a long exposure photograph during the event. She hopes that those who come will go home and try out long exposures with their own cameras.
“Photography can be this delicious, long experience. It doesn’t have to be instantaneous,” Sharp said.
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WHAT: “Light Cache” exhibit by MJ Sharp
WHEN: On exhibit through Jan. 28. Artist talk and demonstration, “Light Cache Live” from 5-7 p.m. Tuesday.
WHERE: Craven Allen Gallery
1106 ½ Broad St., Durham
ONLINE: www.cravenallengallery.com
www.mjsharp.com
