Jock Sturges

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”