2024 Fall – 2025 Spring Exhibit - Anna Maria College

Letters from the Middle East 1998/2024

Sharlin's Way of Seeing

It is with great pleasure we present Jonathan Sharlin: Letters from the Middle East, 1998/2024. The work in this exhibition is an installation first exhibited in 1998. We are privileged to have this excerpted re-installation in 2024. Due to the volume of the original installation, we are only able to exhibit a portion of the work. However, the immensity of the experience echo in its humanity despite the truncated version of this 2024 exhibition. This catalogue contains documented detail from Letters from the Middle East tracing its antecedents and contextual development.

This exhibition/installation is not unlike attending an avant-garde performance. In entering Letters from the Middle East, we step into the gallery transformed into a chamber, we are immediately engulfed by enormous portrait heads and the sound of letters recited aloud. We are instantly transported to a moment in time, over a quarter of a century ago, at a metaphoric dinner table, or seated around a campfire, listening to stories, hearing personal histories. This human story, its intimacies, anguish, and truth, tell of the complexity of people, history, and geography.

For nearly 40 years, Sharlin a photographer of Jewish decent, has explored through his work—the post-Holocaust, modern historicity as its contextual core. His 1987 series, Portrait Narratives, sets the foundational visual queue, which carries through later work, culminating in Letters from the Middle East: Israelis and Palestinians, 1998.

“Portrait Narratives, which began as a personal journey towards understanding the past, ultimately became a conduit for the passing on of memories; a transformative experience for myself and my audience. Israel seemed the logical next step in my quest to understand my own Jewish identity and the history of the Jewish people. My father's father originally came from Palestine, my grandfather emigrating to the United States at the turn of the century.

Sharlin is intensely aware of the connection of past and present exploring through personal discovery and research, focusing on contextual humanity. His photographs are empathetic documents of individuals, depicting their personal truth through conversations and recording their stories. History has pitted Israelis and Palestinians as opposing groups. His intention is to illuminate the personal experience of both, presenting their realities, with hope, in seeming hopelessness, to re-start conversations. The modern history of the Middle East is fraught with tensions, disagreements, and of course, disappointments from its inception, 1948. His work asks us to look, and more importantly see the humanity.

Sharlin is the consummate observer, he sees with clarity and conviction. He deploys a mixture of documentary strategies to present to us what he sees. He seeks to document and elucidate as he explores the world we inhabit.

Darrell Matsumoto

Chair, Department of Art and Design and Gallery Director

¹excerpted from Sharlin's Artist Statement