Top 40 Jock Sturges Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Jock Sturges

Featured in: Desire Quotes

2. “Physical beauty is such a strange thing.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

4. “I know the families that I photograph extremely well, and I’ve known them for a very long time.”

— Jock Sturges

5. “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.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

7. “What I’m good at is making art.”

— Jock Sturges

8. “My hope is that the work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

10. “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.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

13. “I’m an artist that’s attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

15. “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

16. “But empirically I’ve come to understand that my photographs really don’t do any harm.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

18. “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

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

— Jock Sturges

20. “Virtually always I get my best pictures when everybody thinks the shoot’s done.”

— Jock Sturges

21. “I’ll go to do a shoot, I’ll spend five or six hours at the beach with people, and when people think I’m all out of film, then they really relax and I get my good pictures.”

— Jock Sturges

22. “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.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

24. “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

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

— Jock Sturges

26. “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

27. “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.”

— Jock Sturges

28. “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

29. “It’s really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively.”

— Jock Sturges

30. “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.”

— Jock Sturges

31. “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

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

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

35. “Any artist that’s involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

37. “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.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

39. “I don’t photograph any two people who are remotely the same.”

— Jock Sturges

40. “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.”

— Jock Sturges

41. “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

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

— Jock Sturges

43. “I’d rather get back to making art than talk about it.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

45. “There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t like being caressed.”

— Jock Sturges

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

— Jock Sturges

47. “Some of the people that I photographed as sticks became much more voluptuous, much rounder, in some cases dramatically so, and I think they’re even more beautiful.”

— Jock Sturges

48. “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.”

— Jock Sturges

49. “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