"When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed-consent question was answerable"
About this Quote
Sturges’ sentence is doing a careful kind of self-defense: it opens with vulnerability ("I had doubts") and immediately narrows the stakes to something procedural-sounding ("the informed-consent question") that, in his world, is anything but procedural. As a photographer best known for long-term nude portraits of adolescents and their families, he’s invoking the one concept that can’t be aestheticized away. Consent is the moral tripwire his work keeps hitting, and he knows it.
The phrasing matters. "When I started" frames the controversy as a learning curve rather than a permanent ethical fracture. "Years ago" creates distance, suggesting evolution, professionalism, maybe even a record of good faith. And "answerable" is a sly word: it shifts consent from a lived, ongoing negotiation into a solvable problem, like a philosophical puzzle or a legal standard. That’s the subtextual maneuver. If the question can be "answered", then it can be closed, settled, cited.
Yet the quote also quietly admits why the debate around his photographs never dies: informed consent isn’t a checkbox when power, age, and the camera’s permanence are involved. Even if subjects and parents agree in the moment, what counts as "informed" changes with time, with cultural norms, with the subject’s future self. Sturges is pointing at the central paradox of documentary intimacy: the closer the lens gets, the harder it is to pretend everyone understands what the image will become out in the world. In that sense, his doubt isn’t just personal; it’s a tacit acknowledgment that the ethics of looking can’t be fully stabilized by paperwork, trust, or artistic intention.
The phrasing matters. "When I started" frames the controversy as a learning curve rather than a permanent ethical fracture. "Years ago" creates distance, suggesting evolution, professionalism, maybe even a record of good faith. And "answerable" is a sly word: it shifts consent from a lived, ongoing negotiation into a solvable problem, like a philosophical puzzle or a legal standard. That’s the subtextual maneuver. If the question can be "answered", then it can be closed, settled, cited.
Yet the quote also quietly admits why the debate around his photographs never dies: informed consent isn’t a checkbox when power, age, and the camera’s permanence are involved. Even if subjects and parents agree in the moment, what counts as "informed" changes with time, with cultural norms, with the subject’s future self. Sturges is pointing at the central paradox of documentary intimacy: the closer the lens gets, the harder it is to pretend everyone understands what the image will become out in the world. In that sense, his doubt isn’t just personal; it’s a tacit acknowledgment that the ethics of looking can’t be fully stabilized by paperwork, trust, or artistic intention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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