Interview With an Artist

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.
How do you let an incident like the one you went through in 1990 not define you as an artist?

Starting in late 1990 during my federal ordeal I found myself doing a series of appearances and lectures around the country. The typical venue was a law school where I was often a panel member addressing the phenomenon of government incursions into private lives. The other panel members were people whose lives had also been aggressed for any number of different reasons at some point in the past — in one case twenty years previously — and there they were — still talking about it, still angry, still obsessed with what had happened to them. I remember thinking that these people were unwittingly giving their enemies a terrible, permanent victory over them. It felt nothing short of tragic to me.

Then, right after my case was dropped by the feds, every major law firm in California wanted to represent me pro bono to go after the SOB’s because their “investigation” had destroyed a fortune in my personal material. I was understandably angry about this so I said, “Sure. Let’s sue the bastards.” But, after a year of endless meetings during the last of which I discovered that the process could take as much as another twelve years or even more, I made up my mind that I was done with it. Finis. I walked out. I wanted to get back to doing what I loved to do, what I knew how to do: making photographs. So I went home and gathered together every document, every legal brief, every press clipping, every shred of paper that had piled up over the two traumatic years of the investigation and threw it all away. I miss none of it. And frankly, I would rather not talk about it anymore because the discussion distracts from looking at whether my work is any good or not based solely on its own merits. And that of course is all I have ever wanted.

Explain your relationship with the people you photograph and what makes your work different than the typical photographer-model relationship.

I know them; it is as simple as that. Every photograph of a person ever made is a record of the relationship between the model and the photographer. And if, as is sadly too often the case, there is no relationship between the two, it is a record of the absence of a relationship which, from my perspective, is a hollow thing.

Consider fashion magazines. Now that the cold war is over, the entire planet can be scoured for beautiful faces. And it is! The greatest models ever found now are paired with some of the most highly skilled photographers ever to work in fashion using the latest, amazing, digital technology. All of these superlative, the best of everything, and still you can buy one of these magazines and throw it away half an hour later. How is it possible that so many superlatives can result in something that is so easy to discard, so unmemorable? I feel that the root cause of this is the lack of relationship, the nearly complete absence of anything human, anything that truly touches us. You wouldn’t throw away books by Mary Ellen Mark or Sally Mann because the human power in their work moves us, reaches us where we live.

So that’s the engine in my work. I know my models very well and that knowledge is present in the photographs. It’s hard to describe this finally because what’s manifest in the images is so subtle, so subliminal It’s impossible to say, It’s here, It’s this, no this and then this… It can’t be done. It’s ephemeral but somehow there. The relationship, the trust, the attitude of the model to the photographer and vice a versa is there — somehow magically included.

It is in the smallest of details that we have the most profound access to the character, personality, and truth of who people really are. You don’t have access to those perceptions in your photographs until you know your models extremely well and you are trusted. Until you trust one another. The act of making photographs is a mutual act; it is collaborative. Collaboration is a very important word in what I do – one of the most important. We make pictures together.

Finally, I should also say that I want to make pictures that reify people, make them feel better about themselves. I want the pictures to expand their sense of self, their sense of what is possible for themselves. Simply put, I want my pictures to have a strong and positive effect in their lives. Photographs can do that. Truly. I know they can because more than a few of my models have told me later in their lives that this was true for them. This also I like.

How do you see? What is it about a scene or subject that speaks to you and causes you to make the photograph?

I will come at this answer from four slightly different directions.

~
- Taste.

I don’t think that anyone would argue against the notion that it is not possible to dictate taste – or at least it shouldn’t be. It is something that is inherent, built into us. What I choose to photograph has everything to do with the unique, densely interwoven tapestry of experience and association that is my life. A vital component of this is all of the art that I have ever looked at. Of course. Everything we have ever done, seen, experienced, endured, loved, hated, etc., etc combines and creates taste. I like this. Never mind why! As one small example: I was a dance photographer working with the San Francisco Ballet and other ballet companies in the Bay Area for fifteen years. My having worked with classically trained dancers for so long is very likely where I developed my appetite for the slender, athletic line that you often see in my work. Imagine that.

Of course what I respond to in the world in general is unique to me and I would never promulgate what I do as what anyone else should do because nobody else has lived precisely my life. Nobody else should have or could possibly have the same precise taste. There is no discussion here of better or worse – just difference.

So, how does one develop taste? The logic is simple. The more art you look at, the better. The richer your experience is in your individual world, the more you read and think and, I dare say, the less you watch television, the better are your chances. The more you work with a camera and then go out and try and try and try again, the more progress you will make. You try to not take picture the way other people would like you to take pictures; you try and find out what is in the world that you want. For yourself. What bite do you want to take out of the world that only you really want? And while your taste and visual appetites can be understood to be the net result of all your experience in life up to any given moment, you can as well reprogram yourself to a higher level by consciously seeking out as much new experience as possible in the arts and elsewhere. You will be what you eat.

~

- The color blue.

If someone were to ask you what your favorite color might be and you were to answer, say, blue – or whatever else might be the truth in your mind — imagine their saying, “Well, that’s wrong. How can you not like green.” You would, I hope, think that they were deranged. We like what we like. How or why is rarely knowable but the truth is that each of us is entirely unique in every aspect of how we work as an aesthetic engine. I’m sometimes a bit cross with art schools where young people are subjected to significant pressure to think in parallel as it were. Politically correct. This fad. That. My idea of a good diagram for an education in the arts would look more like a bomb going off with streaks of light headed in every imaginable direction, each uniquely relevant to the individual truth and potential of each individual student. Zippity. Nothing parallel. Sorry, Derida. Deconstruct that.

~

- Genius.

Everybody is a genius in their own life. I truly believe this. If you can connect artistically with what you personally know about the world, the work that results is going to be exotic and fascinating to a significant portion of the rest of planet. Really. Each of our lives is so different. You are and know so much more than you realize. Paul Strand spent the last decade of his life photographing in his back yard – my favorite of all of his work. See?

~

- What I know that I don’t know.

So here are some things that I know. I know that if I wait for and then work in beautiful light, my chances are better. I know that if I know my models, if we know each other well and there is real affection and appreciation between us, a good relationship en bref, my chances are better. I know that if I pay close attention to the figure/ground problem, if I work with a ground that I know well, a ground that is clean and simple, lyrical, my chances are better. I know that if I keep my pictures simple, uncluttered, well focused in both senses of the word, my chances are better. But I also know that I can do all these things right, perfectly, and make nothing but failed pictures. And then, magically, a good one. And I don’t know why this is. Try as I might, only a very few pictures ever really succeed. And the agent of their delivery seems simply to be luck. Sweet Serendipity. I try equally hard all the time. Twenty are bad, one is good. Why? We don’t get to know.

There is an important addendum to this last thought. After empathy, I believe that there is no more important aspect of character in a photographic artist than humility. Our best images so often arrive by chance. We are entirely dependent on what is outside us, in the world, for our art. Without a subject, without models, we are nothing and thus, in my own mathematics, I never consider myself more important than the people I photograph. Without them I don’t exist. Nope. So, please be kind to your models. Treat them better than well. We owe them everything. I do. You do too.

How do you decide between using color or black and white?

The color/black-and-white dichotomy is interesting because there was a point in time when I wouldn’t have considered doing color. This had to do with the form color pictures could take. Until a very few years ago even the best color prints represented what I considered unacceptably imperfect reproductions of what had been before the camera. But now, with today’s technology, I am able to make color prints that completely satisfy what I want visually in a color photograph. Modern digital printing with Epson printers and their magnificent ink sets have revolutionized the medium for me. Now I love working in color!

For my take on color vs. black and white, let’s start with how I understand the difference between a fine-art photograph and a snapshot. Let’s say that a snapshot is a one-to-one reproduction of that thing there. A fine-art photograph begins with that, but then it steps into metaphor; it becomes about states of being and contains a larger underlying metaphor that surpasses its superficial content. Snapshots are about that thing there. Done. Fine art pictures are about that thing there – and then about the world of ideas that gives us meaning on a larger scale. The translation is from the specific to the general as it were.

You could, for example, say that many of my pictures are about innocence, the complex opposite of innocence, change and evolution. They are about what stays the same and what doesn’t stay the same, about personality and the space between the pictures. All of these ideas and more are more easily advanced in black and white than color because black and white is already one step removed from reality. It rises into metaphor that much more readily. Black and white is not a perfect reproduction of that thing there; it’s a reduced reproduction. Reduced to essentials. Black and white images are, in a funny way, a bit of a cheat, because their remove makes the translation to studies of metaphor that much easier. I will say, though, that, if they are a cheat, they are a more than adequately elegant one because work in black and white will always be my first love in photography.

Color, because it is stuck to reality by its strong inclination towards verisimilitude, is more difficult. But I love this — the fact that color images reproduce the people in my photographs that much more precisely. So I actually like this result and the increased difficulty, the challenge of it!

Further. When I set out to work in color, color in and of itself is never the point. I pretty much ignore it when I am shooting. I am just looking to make pictures that are true. Once in a while the color in an image is in fact remarkable – especially in images made in the rich wash of light so often given to me by late evenings in France. But it is never the point of any given picture. That will always be the transmission of identity.
How important is it to remain true to yourself and your individual vision as an artist?

As far as I am concerned I don’t have any choice; it’s the only thing that I know how to do. It’s not important, it’s not even essential; it’s all I can do.

The question presupposes the notion that there might be another option, that something might conceivably succeed in dissuading me from my commitment to the work. In my case the government didn’t manage this despite their best effort so I can’t imagine any one else pulling it off either.

Does my experience exist as any kind of general model? I can’t say that. I’m leery of people, not least of all myself, who attempt to suggest that what they have done, what they do is the way to go. I do admire committed artists, especially when that commitment hasn’t come free of charge. I suspect many others do as well. But everyone who wanders into art should be allowed to invent themselves step by step – on their own terms. Thus I am inclined away from generalizations about whether or not they should stay the course. To each their own direction.

I will also say this: I don’t consider myself a rocket scientist – my gifts in life are limited. If I am to leave anything of any moment behind me it will require me always to have worked as hard as ever I can with what little I have. I have. I do. I will.

Are you a romantic?
Absolutely and without question. I am a romantic. I am not an atheist but I don’t escape that label by much. (I don’t think that anybody should be that sure about anything.) At the very least, I am profoundly agnostic. But, nevertheless I do have mystery in my life. Truly. I have a profoundly romantic affection for people and I think if I have a religion, that’s it. Other people. Relationships can be and often are transcendental for me. So, am I a romantic? Yes. Thank you. What’s it to you?
How does, or should, the word “passion” relate to an artist?

I was bemused in graduate school when I heard people standing around talking about what they should do in art. I was perplexed that they didn’t know. I never had the least doubts as to what I wanted to do, I always knew. I was lucky — always passionate.

That passion has been tested in the politically correct climate of graduate seminars, by the rabid moral idiocy of government agents, by the occasional poor review in the press and by the jaundiced opinions of a few intemperate personalities from the not-so-Christian right. But I have never been dissuaded by any of them. Not for a second. Depressed? Yes. Once or twice. But never deflected.

When I first began to photograph seriously as a young man it never occurred to me that my lot in the art world would improve past anonymity. I frankly liked making pictures so much that it didn’t seem imaginable that one could have that much fun working and have it result in any material success in the world. So I never counted on success or even really thought about it. I just worked and held other jobs to keep myself in film and paper. Every second I wasn’t working I was shooting or in the darkroom – day and night, night and day. I loved it. Still do.

In fact a tiny percentage of people have the good luck to actually succeed in a substantial way in the arts and become famous, recognized. I have been very lucky in my life to have that happen for me to some small extent. But this is important: As evinced in my own life I think what succeeds is not a thirst for success, but, ironically, just the opposite. If the thirst for success comes before working then the cart is planted solidly in front of the horse and nothing goes anywhere. But when the passion to make the work is so great that the artist in question moves past caring what anybody else thinks – that is when the lightning can strike. When artists do what they do simply because they love doing the work so much that it becomes enough of a reward all by itself – then they have truly solved the art problem. When that happens, the art organically becomes more and more refined, and everything that doesn’t matter gets cut away; that is when the art world sits up and says, “THIS is what we want”!

On the flip side, photographers who decide to attempt to replace passion with intellectual cleverness too often bore me to death. Their ideas are often so abstruse as to be incomprehensible to most of us, and leave one feeling stupid. The emperor’s new clothes. Or their ideas are so simplistic that one or two pictures make the point well enough to make further iterations unnecessary. Very. Thus conceptually derived work rarely contains any degree of passion for me that I find uplifting in any important way. But that is just me – my appetites are rarely thus assuaged.

No, give me the Shelby Lee Adams, the Mary Ellen Marks, the Edward Westons and Sebastian Salgados, the Joseph Sudeks, the Koudelkas, Meatyards and Disfarmers of the world because they were or are truly passionate and that is what I admire. That is the food for me.
Looking back, knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would do differently?

I was thinking about this very question recently on the occasion of my passing 60. (Jesus) In fact, with the obvious exception of my bitter waltz with the feds, I couldn’t think of anything in my life I might wish to have turned out differently. Ah, those federales… That’s the only chapter in my life that I wouldn’t have minded missing. But the only alternate models of comportment that suggest themselves which might have worked to head off that confrontation presuppose a life of fear and paranoia, of self-editing and doubt. Since I have always believed that my pictures have Truth as their essential virtue, there was no charm at all in any of that. So, no. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Besides, going back further, it was so useful to have had a childhood that chased me into the arts. I feel lucky that my art was given to me so simply. Now you don’t see it. Now you do. Ahhh…

There is of course one final and absolute reason I regret nothing in my past. I am astonishingly lucky at this end of my life to be in love with and married to a wife with whom I now share two striking girls: a nine-month-old and a three-year old, Maia, Maeve and Marine. The three of them together make of me as rich a man as one could ever know. If having done a single thing differently in the past risked delivering me to any other destination in life than precisely where I am now, it would hold not an atom of appeal. I am a profoundly lucky man. You see, there it is again.

Luck.

Jock Sturges,
Seattle, 2009
Listen to Jock talk about his new book Life Time.
Jock Sturges Life Time

You can purchase this book from photo-eye.

The content (photos and text) of this interview is copyrighted.
© Feb 09, Timothy S Morehead & Jock Sturges