“I have many series that are 30 to 35 years long”. Having started in the 1970s, now he is photographing the third generation of his models. “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”. He strives not only to show the beauty of their bodies but also to give a glimpse into their characters. He is deeply involved with the lives of his models and has known most of them and their families for decades. Sturges is not interested in occasional photographs – again and again he returns to the same beaches, photographing his models over a period of many years.
“Nudity means nothing to anybody here…People are naked…because they are naturists and spend their summers in a resort dedicated to the absence of shame.” The photographer captures his models – girls and young women from nudist communities – in the surroundings that are organic to them. His models never undress for the photographer – they were nude before he arrived and will be again as he departs. There is beauty there there is also truth – but no filth. Indeed, his photographs are devoid of exploitive or negative characteristics. Once again his work was ultimately found to be innocent of all pornographic content or intent.
Three years later his work was assailed again by an organized attack by extremist activists from American Christian communities who besieged bookshops aiming to seize and destroy his books. The investigation that ensued lasted two years at the end of which all his images and equipment were returned and no charges brought. The young age of some of his models drew the attention of a conservative federal task force that raided his studio and seized his files and equipment. The photographer’s initial rise to fame was burdened by controversy. Jock Sturges is famous for his series of families taken at communes in Northern California and in naturist resorts in France. The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography presents an exhibition of one of the more celebrated and controversial photographers of the last decades, Jock Sturges.
“One of the most important elements in my work is an absence: the absence of shame”.
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