Quotes By Jock Sturges

Before, I'd photograph anything. I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body.

Some of the people that I photographed as sticks became much more voluptuous, much rounder, in some cases dramatically so, and I think they're even more beautiful.

But the truth is that Homo sapiens is a sensual species. I think all species are, to one degree or another.

They were without clothes before I got there, and they were without clothes when I left.

The images I like best are parts of series that I've started, in some cases, with the pregnancies of the mothers of the children in question, and I continue that series right on through the birth of children to the child that resulted from that first pregnancy.

As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon.

It's no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress.

I just yesterday returned from a trip where I photographed a woman with two children whom I photographed first when she was the age of the older of the two children.

I will always admit immediately to what's obvious, which is that Homo sapiens is inherently erotic or inherently sensual from birth.

But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm.

The kids really enjoy what they do. I check with them constantly to make sure that they're really happy to be there.

Now, I recognize that there are certain postures and angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or something, and I avoid that. I don't shoot that any more.

I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.

It's really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively.

When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed-consent question was answerable.

The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.

I am fascinated by the human body and all its evolutions.

The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very, very collaborative.

I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.

All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in.

We live in an age where anonymity is growing in magnitude like a bomb going off.

I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened.

That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.

Every child is going to grow up. You can see it happen in the books: They get older and older and belong to themselves to a greater and greater extent.

The world is shrinking as we see more and more of it in the media, and the more we see of the world, the smaller we are, the more aware we are of how insignificant any one of us is.

Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

There's no particular evidence that any of the lower mammals or any of the other animals have any interest in aesthetics at all. But Homo sapiens does, always has and always will.

What pedophiles and people who have sexual desires on children lose sight of to a terrible, terrible degree - a devastating degree - is that their victims are real people who will suffer forever whatever abuses are perpetrated on them.

No two people take on the information of being admirable and being admired in the same way.

Any artist that's involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do.