Quotes By Jock Sturges

There isn't a person alive who doesn't like being caressed.

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

There are photographs that I don't take now that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.

Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful.

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.

I've had to relearn how I work with people so that if and when I do avoid different things I don't send any messages in doing so.

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

I know the families that I photograph extremely well, and I've known them for a very long time.

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.

I'm guilty of extraordinary naivete, I suppose. But it's a naivete that I really don't want to abandon, not even now.

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

Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.

Virtually always I get my best pictures when everybody thinks the shoot's done.

If somebody's pointing a trembling finger at your pants and saying you shouldn't be doing that, follow that finger back, go up the arm and look at the head that's behind it, because there's almost always something fairly woolly in there.

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.

In fact, I don't believe I'm guilty of any crimes, but I've always been drawn to and fascinated by physical, sexual and psychological change, and there's an erotic aspect to that.

A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don't know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population.

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

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

I don't photograph any two people who are remotely the same.

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