JOCK STURGES

Callout: My hope is that my work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body, fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it. People who make pinup photographs don''t care who the woman is, what tragedies or triumphs that person''s life might encompass. My work hopefully works exactly counter to that. My ambition is that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is. --Jock Sturges, the "Boston Phoenix" Long known for his radiant black-and-white naturist portraiture, Jock Sturges has also been quietly working in color for more than two decades. "Life Time" presents a broad range of this color work for the first time and carries forward Sturges'' extended portraits of families in Northern California counter-culture communities and on French naturist beaches. Working with the same models and their families in his long-term studies of growth, change and relationship, his large format images borrow significantly from classical periods in both photography and nineteenth and early twentieth century painting. The large color plates in "Life Time" represent almost perfect one to one translations of the original transparencies and are rich with detail and physical and psychological nuance. Sturges describes his work as "identity driven" because his portraits represent collaborations that stretch over entire lifetimes. The confident ease with which all of his subjects present themselves to his camera evidences a rare level of trust and friendship.

Over the course of his career, Jock Sturges'' long-term engagement with his subjects has been a cornerstone of his work. Misty Dawn, one of his primary and most popular muses, is one such subject; he has photographed her for 25 of her 28 years. Lithe, beautiful, classically proportioned, she is the personification of Sturges'' philosophy of being at home in one''s body. This volume follows her growth from a shy, tomboyish child to a gorgeous, confident young woman. Taken as a whole, this series of images presents a unique, fully realized portrait of a blossoming individual and explores a rare and beautiful relationship between photographer and subject. "Misty Dawn: Portrait of a Muse" presents iconic images as well as previously unpublished material, mined from Sturges'' older contact sheets and newest work. Jock Sturges, born in New York in 1947, received a B.A. in perceptual psychology and photography from Marlboro College in Vermont in 1974 and an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985. He has exhibited internationally, and his photographs are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. His previous Aperture books include "Notes, The Last Day of Summer" and "Radiant Identities,"

This volume gives fans of Sturges's unforgettable images a glimpse behind the scenes of his working process, opening up his studio and notes to the viewer for the very first time. Over the past decade, Jock Sturges has produced an incomparable body of work that revels in the beauty of the human form and celebrates the naturist spirit. Jock Sturges: Notes gives fans of his unforgettable images a glimpse behind the scenes of his working process, opening up his studio and notes to the viewer for the very first time. A selection of preparatory studies, shot as Polaroids, accompanies the finished works included here-offering visual testimony to the complex process and inspiration that underlies each of the gorgeous images his audience has come to love and admire. Jock Sturges's other published collections include The Last Day of Summer (Aperture, 1991) and Radiant Identities (Aperture, 1994).