Interview with a Artist

INTERVIEW WITH JOCK STURGES

Jock Sturges, photographer of beauty and form, is one of this generations most celebrated photographers. Despite being respected by his peers and loved by his subjects, Jock has endured more than his fair share of public criticism. He is a prolific photographer with more than a dozen published works including three limited edition portfolios and nine books, his most recent being a colossal color book titled Life Time published in 2008 by Steidl. You need only view the images that Jock creates to understand the admiration and respect that he holds for the friends that he photographs.

Why do you make photos, what is your purpose?

I make photos first and foremost because I want to own them. If someone else had somehow magically made the same pictures I would still want to own them. My work is not about photography itself per se – rather an overwhelming affection for aspects of identity, beauty and line that I want to see repeated in objects I can admire in permanence.

Photographs are a substitute for something, aren’t they? They are not the reality depicted; they are a simply a thin copy. The reality depicted doesn’t exist any longer because time erases everything, second by second. Sooner than later all things go away despite memory’s best efforts – unless of course one has had the good fortune to have made a successful photograph. In that circumstance a picture has the possibility to actually become memory.

As a young photographer, I was always studying the work of the other photographers whom I admired in an attempt to understand how it was done. I thought then that it was most important to understand how pictures were made technically. But it pretty quickly became apparent to me that the technical engine was far less important than the photographer’s larger motivations in making the work in the first place. It was the “why” it was done that mattered, not the “how”. The how had to be there – the craft understood and perfected – but the big story in pictures had to do with what their makers knew about what they had before their cameras. That’s where their work became fascinating. Their pictures were showing me what they knew that I didn’t.

Since then, that has been my mantra; it is what photography is about that matters to me. All important inspiration and revelation dwells in the “about”.



Where does your subject in art come from and how do you work?

The origin of what I do is simple. The second youngest of five brothers (no sisters) I was sent away to boy’s boarding schools and summer camps starting at age 8 and then at 18 went from there to four years in the US Navy which was pretty much a men’s club at that point in history. Out of the military at 23, I found myself in a small liberal, coed college and thus in the presence of women in a meaningful way for the first time in my life. Glory be. My work of the opposite sex began then and has never stopped. 23 years of deprivation forged an unflagging fascination that endures to this day.

As to how I work with my models, that is even simpler to describe. We spend time together, know each other, family to family, for years. We are friends. And once in a while we make pictures together. I think that only about 1% of my time spent doing my “work” as a photographer consists of the actual taking of pictures. The rest of the time is dedicated to the simple social work that makes the photographs possible.

Once working, I try never to pose my models at all. The models who know me best do this best. They understand that “pose”, as it were, comes from them, from what they do naturally, on their own. This is true of all my best pictures. All of them. I see something organic, that has balance, that speaks to me, and I say, “Don’t move!” And that’s it. When I am lucky.

I was intrigued recently to read a magazine article by the photographer, Renée Jacobs, who had had the rare privilege of interviewing Charis Weston, a seminal figure in the history of American photography and without question one of Edward Weston’s greatest models. When Renée asked her what Weston’s working method had been like she replied that he just told her to do whatever she wanted. He trusted her to be herself and that was enough. I was so moved to read this because Weston’s work has always been so important to me. And now I read that our attitude towards our work is more or less identical. This I like. The important truth is that models know vastly better how to be themselves than any photographer ever can. If you are smart you will
Leave
Them
Be!


~

My pictures are almost always titled with the names of the models and the place and date they were taken. This is because the work derives from them and belongs to them. Their significance in the work vastly exceeds my own as an artist. I owe them everything. I wish more photographers were mindful of this. Without our models we are nothing.




What is the contrast between the intent of your work and the perception of your work?

That is an impossible question to answer because perception varies in every individual, and, more broadly, in every culture. There can only ever be differing perceptions of just what any given body of work or individual art object is. The range of possibilities is near infinite. What one person or group finds unlovely, another might consider transcendent, another shocking, another dull. It is finally not my responsibility nor of any great interest to me to address the external perception of my work at all. But I do not seek to please nobody. Not at all. I want first of all to please the people in my pictures and then, close behind, myself. If my work pleases the people it depicts and meets my own standards then I am done asking questions of it.

As far as I know, my work has never in any instance been found problematic by individuals or social systems in Europe. In the early 90’s, during the federal investigation into my work in the states, the FBI tried to persuade the French to investigate me based on their characterization of my photographs as problematic. The French police wrote them back and said, “Not only are such pictures not illegal in France, we actually think they are quite beautiful”. In the European context, the norm is a sexual maturity that surpasses that of many Americans by a significant margin.

I will say, however, that over the past two decades the intent behind my work has grown to incorporate a modicum of political ambition. Pathologically obsessive interest in humans very often derives from what is hidden, forbidden, not seen. My work hides nothing, conceals nothing and thus in time should hopefully work against such illness. Or so I would like to admire.



With your work being forcedly dragged into the political arena, what effect has that had on the way that you work?

It did initially have some effect because what happened to me in 1990 was not short of terrifying. If the feds had managed to convict me, I would have spent a minimum of ten years in prison which read to me like a death sentence.

When I went back to Europe in the midst of this investigation, I was avoiding a lot of compositional angles that I thought might be problematic, something I had never done before. My wife caught me doing this; she caught me crossing legs and on a few occasions even throwing towels on people. She told me to stop and said that I was effectively instructing my models in shame. Doing this was granting the forces assailing me an immediate victory – something they in no way deserved. She was right. I stopped. I have never sought to alter what I have done since.