About MJ Sharp

Parka and headlamp self-portrait at Chun Quoit field, Cornwall 2022

Photographer MJ Sharp is a documentary artist based in Durham, North Carolina. She was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Exeter, UK, for the 2021/2022 academic year pursuing the art/science collaboration Our Disappearing Darkness and Recreating True Night with nocturnal ecologist Dr. Kevin Gaston. She was a Lecturing Fellow at The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University from 2012 — 2022. She served on the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Nasher Museum of Art and was a founding member of the Duke Faculty Union.

Poet and art critic Chris Vitiello’s review of the 2012 Light Cache show is a comprehensive introduction to her work, which featured images from 2004-2010. A 2010 exhibit at Cassilhaus made possible a pivotal winter photography project in Scotland that would be followed a decade later by the Fulbright night photography project in Cornwall UK.

She worked closely with writers and reporters on both short and long form 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.

Her artwork is included in the collections of the Ackland Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Akron Art Museum, the Asheville Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Cassilhaus Collection , the Henry-Copeland Art Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission Art Collection in London.

Dr. Elizabeth Howie

The Neolithic sites are evidence of some of the earliest long-lasting human disruptions of the landscape. As structures that were themselves often designed to frame light, whether by day or night, they are ideal places to consider the impact of light pollution today…It may seem counter-intuitive to use photography to document darkness. Yet only photography has the indexical capacity to collapse time, creating a fossil based in light.

Professor of Art History at Coastal Carolina University

Dr. Jonathan Stuhlman

For a photographer, light is everything. To make photographs in the night requires patience, technical knowledge, and a rare eye for composition and color. MJ Sharp makes her photographs at the limits of both her medium and of most people’s experience with the world.

Senior Curator of American Art at the Mint Museum, Charlotte NC

Dr. Marianne Wardle

Sharp’s images provoke us to rethink our relationship with light, encouraging us to step away from the ever-present glow of the modern world and rekindle our ancient bond with the night sky.

Director of the College of Wooster Art Museum

Frank Konhaus

Her images are typically born in the middle of the night, often under a freezing February moon, inside a hulking mid-century bellows camera, with exposure times that could be described as gestational. The scene is often too dark to be discernible. It is an act of faith (and hard earned experience) that the mysteries of the darkness will be drawn onto the film.

Director of Cassilhaus and the Cassilhaus Collection

Chris Vitiello

Many of Sharp’s images look like regular photographs. Blurred outlines, light discrepancies, or other long-exposure clues are rarely present. In some, odd luminosities and hyperreal details could give the sense that the image isn’t in the simple “click” family of exposures, but never demonstratively so. They aren’t about their process. Instead, they speak to Sharp’s curiosity about seeing in a way that the human eye simply can’t. And they represent, for Sharp, how time might be experienced similarly.

Review of Light Cache exhibit, IndyWeek

Brooke Whiteford

MJ’s work is “the decisive moment” in slow motion.

Collector

Contact MJ

Location

Durham NC USA

Email

info@mjsharp.com