Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

The sentence stumbles forward like someone talking while watching their footing, which is exactly the point. “Relearn” signals rupture: whatever Sturges once thought was normal about how he “work[s] with people” is no longer viable. For a photographer, that phrase is loaded. Collaboration is the job, but so is managing power, access, and the small negotiations that happen off-camera. Saying he’s had to relearn it implies that the old social contract around his practice got challenged hard enough to require rewiring, not tweaking.

The syntax is a tell. “If and when I do avoid different things” is vague in a way that reads less like privacy and more like caution. He won’t name what he’s avoiding, because naming it would locate the controversy. Instead, he’s describing avoidance as a behavior with collateral damage: it “send[s] any messages.” That’s the core anxiety here - not just what he does, but how it’s read. In a field where intention is constantly inferred from images, he’s focused on the meta-communication of boundaries: how to step back without implying judgment, guilt, desire, disgust, fear.

The subtext is reputational triage. He’s attempting to separate withdrawal from accusation, distance from condemnation, restraint from rejection. It’s also a quiet admission that in creative work, especially intimate portraiture, the process is part of the product. The cultural context is a post-consent, post-#MeToo media environment where “working with people” is scrutinized as much as the final photograph, and where silence or avoidance can speak louder than a statement.