Motherhood Quote by Jock Sturges

Sturges frames his work as a long game: not the decisive moment, but the slow accrual of time until a life becomes a narrative you can hold in your hands. By starting, almost clinically, with “the pregnancies of the mothers” and tracking “right on through” to the “child that resulted,” he’s claiming documentary legitimacy through duration. The series isn’t just an aesthetic preference; it’s his ethical alibi. If you’ve been there from the beginning, if the subjects recur by choice, the pictures can be read as relationship rather than extraction.

The language is tellingly procedural. “In question,” “resulted,” “that first pregnancy” - it has the vocabulary of casework, not reverie. That detachment does two things at once. It downshifts sentimentality, keeping the focus on process and continuity. It also distances the speaker from the loaded center of his reputation: photographing nude adolescents in naturist communities, work that has been praised as tender and condemned as exploitative. When he talks about “children” as outcomes of pregnancies, he smuggles controversy into a neutral, almost bureaucratic frame.

Context matters: Sturges emerged in late-20th-century art photography, when “the nude” was still defended as a high-cultural form even as public anxiety about consent and minors sharpened. His insistence on seriality is a bid to move the viewer from voyeurism to kinship - to make you see growth, not exposure. The subtext is a request: judge the work as a continuum of trust, not a single flashpoint image.