Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

Sturges is talking like someone who’s learned, the hard way, that the image isn’t the only thing in the frame. The “postures and angles” aren’t just compositional choices; they’re tripwires. He’s admitting that photographs can activate an almost reflexive moral panic, the kind that collapses nuance into accusation. When he says they “make people see red,” he’s describing outrage as a perceptual filter: viewers don’t merely judge the work, they reclassify it.

The slyest move is the phrase “original sin or something.” It’s half-joke, half-defense, pointing to a cultural inheritance where the nude body is never neutral, where sexuality is presumed even when the subject or intent is otherwise. Calling it “evidence” is pointed: the “sin” isn’t in the model but in the audience’s readiness to project. That dodge - “or something” - also signals how contested the vocabulary is. He can’t name the charge cleanly because the charge itself is slippery: indecency, exploitation, pornography, predation.

“I avoid that” and “I don’t shoot that any more” lands as both aesthetic adjustment and survival strategy. It’s the language of a practitioner acknowledging an external tribunal: publishers, prosecutors, platforms, public opinion. The subtext is an uneasy compromise between artistic vision and social legibility. Sturges isn’t claiming innocence so much as admitting that, in this genre, intent is always on trial, and framing is a form of risk management.