Quotes By Jock Sturges

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

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.

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.

What I'm good at is making art.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.