Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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. I don't shoot that any more.