Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

Sturges’s line lands like a calming generalization, but it’s doing something more tactical: laundering a controversial aesthetic through the language of biology. “The truth is” isn’t a preface so much as a credential; it announces certainty before anyone can object. Then “from birth on” widens the timeline to its most defensible extreme, implying sensuality is pre-cultural, pre-consent debates, pre-everything. By the time he gets to “to one extent or another,” he’s built an escape hatch: it’s absolute enough to sound like a principle, flexible enough to evade falsification.

The key move is “sensual,” a word that can mean tactile pleasure, aesthetic appreciation, bodily awareness, or sexual suggestion depending on who’s listening. That ambiguity is the point. In the mouth of a photographer whose work is frequently entangled with the politics of the nude and the gaze, “sensual species” reads as an attempt to normalize looking - and being looked at - by framing it as human nature rather than choice. It’s not a defense that argues the ethics directly; it’s a reframing that tries to make the ethical question feel misplaced.

Context matters because photography isn’t neutral observation; it’s an arrangement of power: who controls the frame, who benefits, who gets to call something “art” instead of “exploitation.” Sturges’s sentence aims to move the viewer away from suspicion and toward inevitability, away from individual images and toward a grand, soothing claim about humanity. That’s precisely why it works rhetorically - and why it invites pushback: it asks you to accept a universal premise so you don’t scrutinize the particular.