Quotes By Jock Sturges

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I became good at defending myself, but as far as I was concerned, that was a transient skill.

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.

That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.

I'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me.

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.

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