Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Jock Sturges.
“That’s my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.” – Jock Sturges
“Physical beauty is such a strange thing.” – Jock Sturges
“Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful.” – Jock Sturges
“The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.” – Jock Sturges
“As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon.” – Jock Sturges
“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.” – Jock Sturges
“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.” – Jock Sturges
“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.” – Jock Sturges
“I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened.” – Jock Sturges
“I’m guilty of extraordinary naivete, I suppose. But it’s a naivete that I really don’t want to abandon, not even now.” – Jock Sturges
“But empirically I’ve come to understand that my photographs really don’t do any harm.” – Jock Sturges
“I became good at defending myself, but as far as I was concerned, that was a transient skill.” – Jock Sturges
“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.” – Jock Sturges
“We live in an age where anonymity is growing in magnitude like a bomb going off.” – Jock Sturges
“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.” – Jock Sturges
“Before, I’d photograph anything. I didn’t think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body.” – Jock Sturges
“Any artist that’s involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do.” – Jock Sturges
“I’m an artist that’s attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.” – Jock Sturges
“I know the families that I photograph extremely well, and I’ve known them for a very long time.” – Jock Sturges
“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.” – Jock Sturges
“I don’t photograph any two people who are remotely the same.” – Jock Sturges
“I’d rather get back to making art than talk about it.” – Jock Sturges
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