War & Peace Quote by Jock Sturges

Sturges frames his work as a hunt for a rare state: consent that looks like calm. The key phrase is "completely at peace", a soft-focus moral credential that does a lot of labor in one breath. It positions the photographer not as a taker but as a witness, someone who supposedly arrives after the psychological work is already done. In a medium haunted by extraction, he’s staking a claim that his images come from mutual ease rather than power.

"Being what they were" is deliberately slippery. It sounds like a defense of authenticity, even inevitability: not costumes, not performance, just people in their element. But it also dodges the blunt questions photography forces: who gets to define what someone "was" in that moment, and who profits from the definition? The subtext is an ethic of naturalism that wants to outrun the camera’s inherent asymmetry. A subject may feel peace; the frame can still become someone else’s spectacle.

The line’s second half, "in the situations I photographed them in", quietly centers the artist’s authorship. Situations don’t simply exist; they’re selected, entered, and made legible by a photographer. Sturges is asking the viewer to accept an atmosphere of trust as context enough, to read serenity as proof of rightness.

That’s why the quote works rhetorically: it anticipates critique by foregrounding affect. Peace becomes both aesthetic and alibi, an argument that the emotional temperature of the image can certify the morality of its making.