Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

There’s a blunt honesty in Sturges’s repetition: “really, really hard” isn’t poetic, it’s survival talk. Coming from a fine-art photographer, the line reads less like complaint than like a quiet admission of how the art world actually functions. The romantic myth says you make the work, the work finds its audience, and the audience pays your rent. Sturges is pointing at the gap between cultural prestige and economic reality: museums, grants, and gallery shows confer legitimacy, but they rarely provide steady income, especially if you’re trying to live “exclusively” off personal work.

The word doing the most work is “exclusively.” It hints at a temptation - and a compromise. Most photographers who endure build a mixed ecology: commercial gigs, teaching, editorial, commissions, licensing. Exclusivity is framed as purity, but it can also be a luxury reserved for the already-resourced or the already-famous. Sturges is naming the structural truth that the market rewards what’s legible and saleable, while fine art often asks for patience, ambiguity, and time.

Context matters here because Sturges’s career has been shadowed by controversy over his nude portraits of adolescents. Whatever one’s view, the quote also reads like an oblique nod to how reputation, gatekeeping, and moral panic can narrow the paths to patronage. “Hard” isn’t just about money; it’s about access, legitimacy, and the fragile social permission that fine-art photography depends on to circulate at all.