The writing in Jeff Sharlet’s gorgeous new book...takes place between lonely traumas ...
Sharlet takes us to pockets of the world most of us will never see or bother to notice, and he has an unusual ability to find grace in everyone’s story, training his eye on those whom the rest of us avoid, either out of fear or a lack of curiosity ... Sharlet also photographs the most ordinary objects and moments: the light at sundown, a scale, a window lit with the glow of a television. It’s as if there had been a net strung beneath the edits of his previous books and articles, catching all the incredible moments too enigmatic to fit a traditional story ..When we suffer, we often no longer feel connected to the things we know; in many ways This Brilliant Darkness is a document of the searching that follows grief. ... The book ingeniously reminds us that all of our lives — our struggles, desires, grief — happen concurrently with everyone else’s, and this awareness helps dissolve the boundaries between us.
We often say that a book has changed our lives. But it’s rare to say that a book made us more human. This is a big statement, I know, but This Brilliant Darkness feels as transformative and essential as anything I have read in years. Sharlet’s work is an incantation, a prayer for and summoning of the human powers of observation, empathy, and compassion ... an intimate travelogue of human suffering, confusion, and, in fleeting moments, transcendence ... a wholly hypnotic series of short essays, most of which are accompanied by Sharlet’s tender, bare photos. The easiest comparison is to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans’s photographic and literary chronicle of impoverished Great Depression farmers. Sharlet’s book, though rooted in the same powerful synergy between images and text, feels even more expansive in its attempt at community ... an eloquent, bracing invitation to look at the human cost of this human suffering.
... [a] powerful new work of nonfiction ... a collection of empathetic portraits of those enigmatic figures who haunt the edges of our vision ... The book’s loyalties are with the disenfranchised—the rural poor, the runaways, those living with mental illness, and people who survive by doing sex work. Sharlet is a reporter at heart. He presents his subjects’ stories in punchy and direct prose, then leaves it to us whether to raise eyebrows or take people at their word. He is never interested in passing judgment or offering a moral ... This Brilliant Darkness most frequently reminded me of the short fiction of Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, writing that insists the lives of blue-collar laborers and heroin-addicted misfits are worthy of representation.
Sharlet’s subjects of investigation certainly include things and the people who make them, but those very people are often times the ones giving flesh to the incarnate word through their stories ... This Brilliant Darkness illustrates how human beings make sense of their worlds through the divine and its various presences and absences ... This is less a book of Sharlet’s reflections on the world 'out there,' and more of a living record of how Sharlet and his readers are made and remade through the stories consumed about one another, with one another, if only for a moment’s time. In many ways, Sharlet’s subject is the human heart itself and its capacity to expand beyond the confines of the physical body: human, nation-state, or otherwise. It is also about the forces and experiences that call upon the human heart to open itself up to the stranger and under what conditions ... Both Sharlet’s extended writings and his short meditations illuminate these sensations because the work of collecting them is in itself an act of sensation ... Sharlet invites us to consider what brilliant darkness arrests our own attention in both individual and collective terms in calamitous times.
This Brilliant Darkness is a project of empathy. We are meant to look at a masseuse who dispenses happy endings in Ireland or a gay hustler in Russia or a shirtless addict on the streets of L.A. and feel we understand them. We are to see them as human. If it all sounds a bit like 'Humans of New York' ... it should. It’s virtually the same endeavor: to show us that other people exist ... But is transforming a person into an anecdote truly a way of seeing them? ... Do these pictures honor or misrepresent? Do they titillate, as pornography, or valorize, as propaganda? Do they accomplish something as art, or, leaving that aside, as journalism? Every reader will have their own answers. This Brilliant Darkness reminded me more than anything of the episode of The Simpsons in which Bart hosts a news broadcast for children, delivering human interest segments that turn out to be a huge hit. As his co-anchor, Lisa, says: 'Boy, that phony schmaltz of yours sure is powerful stuff.'
Sharlet is admittedly not primarily or even secondarily a photographer. But he has a good eye, especially in low-light conditions that produce a lyrical murk. These unsettled photos exemplify a paradox: the less precise the edge, the sharper their sense of time ... Journalism meets art in this book; art leaks into journalism, sideways. The approach Sharlet takes with This Brilliant Darkness is a reminder that this vast life is no monolith, only a collection of fragments that are captured but in passing ... Sharlet stopped to listen, to see, to take a remembrance: a shockingly rare act ... They are beautiful interruptions in the ceaseless progress of time. They pause for a moment to speak the name of what vanishes, which sounds just like a shutter’s click.
Through these stories, Sharlet not only looks at their pain, but explores his own, and confronts these stories not by glamorizing the suffering, but humanizing it by breaking through the isolation and getting to know the subjects of his images, erasing the line between journalist and subject ... Sharlet provides a poignant and wholly intimate portrait of the lives of those who are often overlooked in our society, breathing a sense of humanity into a part of our world that is so often inhumane. A highly recommended book that is at times difficult to take in and difficult to put down.
Sharlet’s most in-depth accounts tell...crushing stories ... With shimmers of Robert Frank and James Agee, Sharlet’s images and words, hypnotic and haunting flares in the dark, coalesce into a trenchant work of witness and empathy.
Lives lived in shadows and corners are lit up in these offbeat photo-journalistic essays ... Most of the pieces are short, evanescent essays, but Sharlet includes longer pieces ... Sharlet’s haunting photos accompany clipped, pointilist, but expressive prose that evokes character and tragedy ... The result is a triumph of visual and written storytelling, both evocative and moving.
