Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

Sturges opens with a defensive preamble that already tells you where the pressure point is: legality. “In fact” and “I don’t believe” sound less like certainty than a man rehearsing a line for the public record. That rhetorical move mirrors the career-long controversy around his photographs of nude adolescents and young adults, work that has been defended as art and attacked as exploitation. The quote is an attempt to thread a needle: to claim innocence while admitting the very charge that alarms critics.

The engine here is the triad “physical, sexual and psychological change.” It frames adolescence as a total metamorphosis, not merely a body but a shifting self. That’s the aesthetic alibi: the photographer as witness to transformation, compelled by liminal states the way some artists are drawn to decay, birth, or aging. Yet he doesn’t leave it at anthropological fascination. “There’s an erotic aspect to that” is the candor that functions like a controlled burn. He’s not denying desire; he’s domesticating it, folding eroticism into the language of curiosity and change so it reads as inevitable rather than predatory.

Subtext: he wants permission to look. Not just to look, but to be understood as someone whose looking is principled. The quote also nudges responsibility onto biology and psychology; if change is erotic, then arousal becomes a byproduct of nature, not a choice. In a culture that polices adult attention toward youth with good reason, that move lands as both disarmingly honest and strategically slippery. It’s less a confession than a bid to reframe the terms of judgment: from “What are you doing?” to “What is adolescence, really?”