Jock Sturges Quotes

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

What I'm good at is making art.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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'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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I use an 8 x 10 view camera. All other cameras are just toys.

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

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

Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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