Love Quote by John Sexton

There is a quiet provocation in Sexton's move: he takes a word usually used to diminish craft and turns it into a badge of artistic legitimacy. "Amateur" here isn't shorthand for untrained; it's a moral category. The best photographers, he argues, are driven by appetite rather than market logic, curiosity rather than careerism. That reframing lands because photography has always sat awkwardly between art and commerce: a medium born from technology, easily monetized, and constantly pressured to prove its seriousness. Sexton offers a way out of that anxiety. Love becomes a standard more exacting than credentials.

Name-checking Arnold Newman sharpens the point. Newman is famously associated with the "professional" pinnacle: high-profile portraiture, impeccable technique, a kind of photographic authority. Sexton doesn't deny any of that, then undercuts the hierarchy by insisting that Newman's real power is his amateurism "in the pure sense" - from amare, to love. It's a rhetorical judo flip: the professional's greatness is explained not by his professionalism but by his refusal to let professionalism be his core identity.

As an educator, Sexton is also speaking to students and institutions that often reward polish over risk. The subtext is a warning: when you make photography purely about being legible to clients, competitions, or gatekeepers, you amputate the impulse that makes images feel alive. He's defending a posture of perpetual beginnerhood - not ignorance, but openness - as the engine of lasting work.