Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

There is a deliberate self-indictment in Sturges's phrasing: "guilty" turns a personality trait into a charge, as if the world has already convened a trial about what he sees and why he keeps looking. The naivete is "extraordinary", not the cute, everyday kind, but something bordering on willful - a stance that invites suspicion precisely because it refuses the standard defenses. Then comes the pivot that does the real work: he doesn't just admit naivete, he claims it as an ethical necessity. "I really don't want to abandon" frames innocence not as ignorance but as a discipline, a refusal to let cynicism dictate the terms of perception.

In the context of Sturges's career - photographing nude adolescents in natural settings, work praised by some as tender and condemned by others as exploitative - that insistence reads like a provocation and a shield at once. He's arguing that the camera can still encounter the body without predation, that looking can be intimate without being corrupt. The subtext is the pressure of a culture that increasingly treats such claims as either disingenuous or dangerous. "Not even now" hints at scandal, backlash, or the grinding passage of time: a moment when retreat would be prudent, when insisting on purity of intent looks indistinguishable from denial.

The line works because it stages a conflict between two modern instincts: protectiveness that hardens into suspicion, and artistic vision that depends on an unarmored openness. Sturges bets that naivete - kept intact, even stubbornly - is the only way his images can mean what he says they mean.