Our Disappearing Darkness

Fulbright Scholar Award
​Cornwall, UK
2021/2022

A vanishingly small percentage of our evolutionary time as human beings has been spent in artificial light. For a large part of the world’s population, the experience of night is quickly becoming a boutique and privileged one. When we are robbed of night—from seeing the night sky that fueled the world’s mythologies to experiencing our own creaturely human adaptation to the dark— what are we missing? Photographer MJ Sharp was on a 2021/2022 US/UK Fulbright Scholar Award to collaborate with Professor Kevin Gaston at the Environment and Sustainability Institute in Cornwall to try to answer that question.

Cornwall is remarkable both for its concentration of prehistoric sites and for its dark skies. Archeological evidence from some prehistoric megaliths suggests that people were visiting these ancient sites in liminal light or at night, findings that inspired this exploration of what we are missing when we live our lives awash in light pollution. As Professor Elizabeth Howie notes, The Neolithic sites are evidence of the 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.

Dr. Marianne Wardle, Director of the College of Wooster Art Museum, suggests that 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.