Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

Sturges is doing the careful rhetorical dance of the artist who knows exactly where the cultural tripwires are. He opens with an almost utopian premise - the body as morally neutral, a refusal of the inherited hierarchy that treats some anatomy as “obscene” and other anatomy as merely “human.” That first sentence positions him inside a tradition of modernist innocence: if you could just look plainly, you could see without judging.

Then he punctures that ideal with a wry concession: people “see red” at “certain postures and angles.” This is less about biology than about the camera’s power to choreograph meaning. A posture can be read as confidence, vulnerability, invitation, or violation depending on the viewer’s training and anxiety. By calling those reactions “evidence of original sin or something,” he’s half-mocking, half-acknowledging the Puritan software still running in the background of Western spectatorship. The phrase “or something” is telling: he doesn’t fully buy the theology, but he recognizes the reflex.

The subtext is pragmatic, even defensive. Sturges isn’t claiming the audience is wrong to react; he’s admitting that intent doesn’t control reception. In photography especially, “angle” is interpretation. So “I avoid that” reads as both ethical stance and reputational survival strategy: a self-imposed boundary meant to keep the work within the realm of art rather than accusation. It’s an admission that innocence isn’t just a subject matter - it’s a negotiated contract between artist, viewer, and the moral climate of the moment.