Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

The line reads like a gentle credo, but it’s also a quiet act of boundary-setting. “Attracted to a specific way of seeing” frames Sturges’s photography as less about subject matter than about gaze: an insistence that the camera is an extension of perception, not appetite. It’s a familiar move in artist talk, shifting scrutiny from what’s in the frame to how the frame is made, asking you to judge craft, light, patience, composition, temperament.

Then he widens it: “a way of being.” That phrase carries the heavier subtext. Sturges isn’t just describing an aesthetic; he’s describing an identity, almost a lifestyle, as if his work can’t be separated from his presence, his relationships, his long-term immersion in a milieu. For photographers especially, that’s both persuasive and precarious. The medium is built on access. Claiming “a way of being” can read as ethical commitment (trust, consent, continuity) or as a rhetorical shield that treats criticism as misunderstanding the artist’s essence.

Context does the real work here. Sturges is known for intimate, naturalistic portraits of nude adolescents and families in nudist communities, work that has been repeatedly contested, defended, censored, and litigated in the culture wars over art, obscenity, and exploitation. In that light, the quote functions less as a neutral statement of style than as a reframing strategy: don’t reduce my images to scandal; understand them as a worldview. It’s an attempt to relocate the debate from legality and harm to intention and perception, where the artist has home-field advantage.