JOCK STURGES

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What I'm good at is making art.

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.

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.

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.