Jock Sturges

The photographer of nude young women has been pilloried as a pornographer, but it's hard to think of a less voyeuristic photographer working.

By Charles Taylor

Jan 18, 2002 | I have to confess it makes me a little uneasy to be writing about the photographs of Jock Sturges under the heading of "Sex." Not because sex doesn't play a part in Sturges' work, which is mostly photographs of nude adolescent and preadolescent girls taken in naturist communities in France and Northern California. And certainly not because there isn't an erotic element in the pictures.

I don't want to do anything to besmirch Sturges' reputation any more than it already has been. As any photographer who works with such a subject might expect -- hell, as anyone who has the temerity to address the question of sex and minors knows -- Sturges has weathered his fair share of abuse. I'm not just talking about the raised eyebrows or titters his work sometimes provokes, or the casual unthinking dismissal of him as a pervert. Beginning in 1990, the FBI conducted an investigation into Sturges' work and his subjects in an attempt to prosecute him as a child pornographer. The case was rejected in toto by the grand jury hearing it. And in 1998 grand juries in Alabama and Tennessee indicted Barnes and Noble on child pornography charges for selling monographs of Sturges' work. (Randall Terry, of Operation Rescue, takes credit for bringing the work to the attention of authorities, as well as for his followers' actually destroying some books in stores.)

For a photographer whose work is exceptionally composed, tranquil and, above all, mature, Sturges provokes a great deal of suspicion and even revulsion. But the more you look at the openness of his photographs, the harder it is not to feel that those reactions come from the misguided belief that acknowledging the beauty and sexuality of minors is the same thing as pedophilia. "Sexuality in the American concept," Sturges wrote in the afterword to his first monograph, "The Last Days of Summer," "especially the American legal definition -- is supposed to begin at age eighteen as if a knife blade drops ... our arbitrary demarcations serve more to confound our collective sexual identity than to further our social progress."

It's hard to think of a less voyeuristic photographer working. In photograph after photograph, Sturges, who is showing recent work at the Louis K. Meisel Gallery, in Manhattan (through Jan. 29), allows his young subjects to meet his camera with the steady gaze of preternatural seriousness you see in Victorian photographs of children -- although unlike those photographs, in which the sexuality of both the subject and the photographer's gaze is submerged and unacknowledged, they're far from creepy or voyeuristic. Even if Sturges' intentions weren't clear from his work -- and I believe they are -- it would simply be impossible, from a practical and technical standpoint, for his work to be either surreptitious or voyeuristic.

First, the camera he uses is extremely large, 8-by-10, and tripod-mounted, which makes it impossible to hide or move, and requires the subjects to pose. (The size of the camera, as photography critic A.D. Coleman has noted, is also evident from the graninlessness of the prints. And, apparently, many of Sturges' subjects have, over the years, become so familiar with his process that they are now able to act as his assistants.) Second, Sturges forms ongoing relationships with his subjects. He does not follow the standard procedure of having his subjects sign release forms when he takes their pictures because he doesn't like the idea that the image is out of the subject's control once the release is signed.

"When I want to use a photograph," he has said, "I contact each person, explain the context in which I wish to exhibit or publish the picture, and get permission for that specific purpose. Either I stay in touch with people or I don't deserve to use their pictures. People mature, grow older, change. I never want to be guilty of making assumptions about those changes."

Next Page: His photographs must be described by that loaded word "erotic"

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