Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

Trust is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and Sturges knows it. By leading with "I know", he’s not describing a workflow so much as staking a claim to legitimacy: access isn’t accidental, it’s earned. In documentary photography, closeness can be a credential, a way to argue that the camera isn’t predatory but invited. The line is built to pre-empt suspicion, especially for an artist whose subject matter has long triggered public panic and legal scrutiny. "Extremely well" isn’t just familiarity; it’s an ethical shield.

The phrase "the families that I photograph" also narrows the field. He’s not talking about anonymous subjects or street encounters; he’s emphasizing continuity and community, a repeated relationship rather than a one-off extraction. That matters because photographs are power: they freeze bodies, make them portable, and let strangers look. Long-term intimacy is offered here as a corrective to that asymmetry, suggesting collaboration instead of capture.

"I've known them for a very long time" is the quiet pivot from consent to duration. Time becomes moral evidence. It implies intergenerational permission and a shared history that outsiders can’t easily judge from a single image. The subtext is defensive but not purely evasive: it’s the language of someone arguing that context is the missing frame. Sturges is asking to be evaluated not just on what’s pictured, but on the relationships that made the picture possible, and on the uncomfortable idea that trust can be real even when the audience feels none.