"I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it"
About this Quote
The line has the impatience of a working artist forced into the role of spokesperson, and it doubles as a quiet power move. "I'd rather" signals a preference, but also a refusal: Sturges is drawing a boundary between the private labor of making images and the public labor of justifying them. For a photographer, that distinction matters because talk is always a second-order medium. It turns pictures into arguments, biographies, confessions, court exhibits. Making art, by contrast, gets to remain slippery and irreducible.
In Sturges's case, the subtext is inseparable from the context. His long-running work photographing nude adolescents has been praised as classical, naturalistic, and tender by some, and condemned as exploitative or pornographic by others; it has attracted legal scrutiny and periodic moral panic. In that environment, "talk about it" isn't casual shop talk. It's interrogation, damage control, the endless demand to translate intention into a clean, defensible statement that will satisfy people who may already have their verdict.
The quote also flatters the medium. It implies that the photographs can carry what language will only cheapen: complexity, ambiguity, the awkward mix of innocence, sexuality, and power that audiences tend to resolve into slogans. There's a strategic humility in retreating to craft, but also a dodge: refusing to narrate your motives lets the work stay open, and leaves critics to fight the battle on your terms - inside the frame, not across a podium.
In Sturges's case, the subtext is inseparable from the context. His long-running work photographing nude adolescents has been praised as classical, naturalistic, and tender by some, and condemned as exploitative or pornographic by others; it has attracted legal scrutiny and periodic moral panic. In that environment, "talk about it" isn't casual shop talk. It's interrogation, damage control, the endless demand to translate intention into a clean, defensible statement that will satisfy people who may already have their verdict.
The quote also flatters the medium. It implies that the photographs can carry what language will only cheapen: complexity, ambiguity, the awkward mix of innocence, sexuality, and power that audiences tend to resolve into slogans. There's a strategic humility in retreating to craft, but also a dodge: refusing to narrate your motives lets the work stay open, and leaves critics to fight the battle on your terms - inside the frame, not across a podium.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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