Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

There’s a quiet flinch in Sturges’s phrasing: “public consumption” sounds less like looking and more like using. He’s naming the gap between an artist’s studio ethic and the audience’s appetite, and the word choice is the tell. “Consumption” implies a market logic and a bodily metaphor at once; it’s the language of appropriation, not contemplation. For a photographer whose work has long sat in the crosshairs of debates about nudity, adolescence, and consent, that’s not abstract anxiety. It’s a lived condition of being read through other people’s desires.

The line works because it refuses both martyrdom and denial. Sturges doesn’t claim purity, nor does he concede guilt. He frames the problem as “dichotomy,” a clinical term that signals structure: two systems running in parallel, each with its own rules. “Intent and practice” doubles down on process, implying that ethics aren’t just what he means but what he does - relationships built over time, permissions negotiated, images made within a community rather than extracted from it. That insistence is also a defensive move, aware that photography’s power is inseparable from photography’s vulnerability to misreading.

“Uneasy… on occasion” is the strategic understatement. It suggests he lives with the tension most days, and only sometimes allows himself to admit how corrosive it is. The subtext is an artist recognizing that authorship ends at the edge of the frame; after that, interpretation belongs to the crowd, and the crowd is not obligated to be decent.