Radiant identities : photographs by Jock Sturges / introduction by Elizabeth Beverly ; afterword by A. D. Coleman

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My hope is that the work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it. That's of no interest to people who make pinup photography. They don't care who the woman is, what tragedies or triumphs that person's life might encompass. That's of absolutely no relevance. However, not everything is so bad in the career of a photographer. There are also those who support the man, and his works are highly appreciated. For example, the American writer Jennifer McMahon used Sturges’ photos to decorate the covers of her three books. Besides, they even made a film about the man’s life, which was released in Germany in 2008, and in 2016 it could be seen by Russian viewers. Private life He is constantly banned, persecuted, and accused of various sins. He shoots beautiful people, once again proving with his pictures how perfect a person is, how perfect is his body. Those who can see in his pictures something other than beauty, perfection, and innocence, should think about whether everything is normal with him. Childhood and adolescence Sturges: Let me make an important distinction here. I will always admit immediately to what's obvious, which is that Homo sapiens is inherently erotic or inherently sensual from birth. But, by the same token, that remains the property of the individual in question up until the point where they become sexually of age, as it were, and it's arguable as to what that age is. If I said for attribution that it was before 18 years old, I'd be hung, drawn, quartered, the whole thing, in American society. In Europe it would raise no eyebrows at all.

We're really blind in this country. People don't see the extraordinary inconsistencies. I think the average age for the loss of virginity for female children in this country now is like 14 1/2 or 15. There's this vast epidemic of unwed mothers and teenage mothers, and yet we have an 18-year-old age of consent which makes them all felons. If the age of consent were lower, and you could talk to these children intelligently and not have to worry about school boards and PTAs going apoplectic if you mention the word condom, let alone sex and making people intelligent about it, probably we'd have a whole lot more intelligent take on the whole thing. As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon. Sterngold, James (September 20, 1998). "Censorship in the Age of Anything Goes; For Artistic Freedom, It's Not the Worst of Times". The New York Times . Retrieved February 17, 2013. Metro: Let me ask you this: How do you work with models, particularly young models, in a way that does not appropriate their sexuality, their eroticism, their sensuality, for adult purposes?

People need to realize that a cultural war has been declared here," Sturges says strongly. "A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don't know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population. This represents a whole new level of attention to the arts by repressive forces. It's very scary, and it has to be withstood."

Sturges: Right. They control their photographs because I don't let them sign model releases. I urge them never to sign a model release for anybody unless they have been paid specifically to do a specific job on a contractual basis, for an advertising agency or something. Who knows how they're going to change? I don't want to ever be guilty of making assumptions about those changes. They might marry a Methodist minister from Minnesota and have a very conservative life. It's not inconceivable that at some point in the future they might decide that these pictures embarrass them. That's never happened to me, but the control, the power to decide whether that happens or not, shouldn't be mine--it should be the kids', and that's where it stays. It creates a very complex life for me, I promise you. When I want to use a picture in a book, I have got to call foreign countries, find people, explain the context. My phone bills are astronomical sometimes. Metro: Having been through all that you've been through, I can't imagine how you can take photographs now without having legal concerns somewhere in your mind.Very naturally, the ages of consent in Europe are vastly lower than they are here, in recognition of the fact that when you have people involved with sexuality, you may as well make it legal so that you can deal with them better about it, so that they'll talk to you and you can educate them. Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography. Beem, Edgar Allen (January 3, 2008). "Catching Up with; The Way of All Flesh". Photo District News. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015 . Retrieved February 23, 2013. The book that I have worked on for the past four years is a photographic re-creation of the intersections and divergences of my father’s secret life and the traditional paternal role he played. The project consists of vernacular photographs, new captures and ephemera to tell a story and investigate a childhood mystery. Ironically, several of the archival photos in the project were photographed by me and my father on separate trips to West Berlin in the winter of 1961 but were only rediscovered recently. The Need to Know is the intersection of the factual and fictional based upon historical research, family archives, my memories, and my imagination. It's laughable, and we'll win these cases, however far it has to go," Sturges continues. "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. If obscenity is simply a matter of somebody being without clothes, then there are so many other things that would be inherently obscene--medical books, the National Geographic.

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. In very many cases that was without clothes, and it simply was not an issue. They were without clothes before I got there, and they were without clothes when I left. That was just a choice that they had made, and one they didn't even think about; they were simply more comfortable that way. It never occurred to me that anybody could find anything about that perverse. It was a total surprise to me, which is obviously evidence of my having been pretty profoundly naive about the American context. But over the course of my life I've spent so much time in this context that I'd forgotten that Homo sapiens isn't always like that, which is indeed naive of me. I'm guilty of extraordinary naiveté, I suppose. But it's a naiveté that I really don't want to abandon, not even now. Sturges: I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being. Any artist that's involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do. I am fascinated by the human body and all its evolutions. 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 have series that are 25 years long. 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.In our society there's so much shame attached to sexuality in a lot of social milieus that sexual abusers here on the average have had something like 70 or 100 victims before they're finally caught. In Holland where the age of sexual consent is, I think, 13, the average is vastly lower--it's like three or four. That's because people tell much sooner, because shame is absent. The Eye Mama book is a photographic portfolio showcasing the mama narrative and the mama gaze, what female and non-binary photographers see when they look at, and into the home. The following interview was conducted with Sturges in his San Francisco home by writer David Steinberg, who writes frequently about the culture and politics of sex. Sturges: There are photographs that I don't take now that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations. The truth is that people who are naturists, who are used to being without clothes, are unself-conscious about how they sit around, how they throw themselves down on the ground, how they sit in a chair, how they stand. They don't think about it; it's not an issue. There's nothing obscene about them. Before, I'd photograph anything. 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 don't shoot that any more. But it's difficult. At one point, [my wife] Maia found me crossing legs, or avoiding angles, or giving instructions which inadvertently were instructing young people that some aspect of what they were doing was inherently profane, some aspect of who they were inherently were profane. 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'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me. This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography.

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. If I'm able to make pictures of children that are so real, as you follow the children over the years in any given book, and in subsequent books they get older and older and grow up, perhaps there might be something cautionary in that visual example, because the truth is that every pedophile's victims eventually grow up and become adults who are willing to turn around, and that's when they get caught. 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.For Sturges, these changes are part of the continuing saga of legal challenges and controversy surrounding his work. On April 25, 1990, FBI agents and San Francisco police officers raided his studio, seizing his cameras, his prints, his computer--everything relating to his occupation as an internationally recognized fine-art photographer. Art communities, both in San Francisco and nationally, rallied around Sturges, his work and the legitimacy of respectful nude photography of children and adolescents. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors denounced the raid and a San Francisco grand jury refused to indict Sturges on any charges. Sturges: I've had a number of American adolescents who, when they hit high school, said, "I really don't want to see these pictures published right now," and they were immediately pulled. I took them out of the galleries. They completely ceased to exist as far as the public perception of the images went. But when the kids were finished with high school they said, "Don't worry about that; I just went through a stage, and it's fine now." Sturges: I've only once had a model go in that direction, and she was on her way there before I met her. A remarkably narcissistic human being. The principal way that I work is that I tell people not to move when they're doing something that I like. It's almost always something relatively improbable, which is to say, not a glamour pose, not the arms behind the head, not that kind of thing. The message is that who you are naturally is what I like the best. Virtually always I get my best pictures when everybody thinks the shoot's done. I'll go to do a shoot, I'll spend five or six hours at the beach with people, and when people think I'm all out of film, then they really relax and I get my good pictures. Hopefully the message is that you don't have to pose and put on makeup and be glamorous to be admirable. You're most admirable when you're the most human. I hope that's the message that my work delivers. Nothing unusual has happened recently around the name of the photographer, he still continues to do photography and, despite numerous conflicts, adheres to the chosen concept.