Quotes from Jock Sturges


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


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.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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.


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.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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