Quotes By Jock Sturges

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.