Customer Reviews

Jock Sturges: Notes

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For those who are simply wanting a collection of large Sturges photographs, this will not fill the bill. For those who are interested in Jock Sturges, the person, and some background on his models this is the one to get. You get some background into his process and how he goes about his work. There is a collection of Polaroid shots he uses in formulating his approach to the picture. You are then treated to a wonderful selection of B&W images, most taken in 2003 with a few from 2000 and 2001. Several of the pictures have comments by the model. For several of his models, there is an update of their lives as they were photographed as they grew older. There is reference to the sheer work involved in processing and printing his photographs, but I felt it was greatly understated; dealing with an 8 x 10 negative format camera and film is not a trivial task, but the results are fantastic. Nor is getting the lighting just right on the beaches easy, but the use of light and shadow in his prints shows he makes it look easy. The latter part of the book touches upon his newer work in fashion photography. Misty Dawn nee Johnson has quite a few pages to express her thoughts on her long association with Jock. The dimensions of the book are not large, but it is put out by Aperture, which stands for high quality in printing works of photography.

This book is quite different from any book of Sturges' I've seen before. At first the main thing to notice is that it is smaller in size and shorter on complete images. But it seems that Sturges is trying to create a more intimate feel in this book and, in that, he succeeds. Because his purpose in this book is more than presenting his photographs.

The title of this book is Notes for a reason. In it, we find considerably more text than we usually do in a Sturges book and it is not confined to forewords and afterwards. There are, in fact, "notes" interspersed throughout the photographs. Many of the notes are by Sturges himself though there are a number by his models. The point of these (as well as a number of Polaroid photos) is to give us some insight into how Sturges works, how he develops his concepts and final images. And they do do that to some extent though, if the truth be told, the workings of composing a beautiful portrait remains a mystery. Still, it's an interesting attempt.

On the other hand, I found the notes by the models quite interesting. Many of the models have worked with Sturges for over 20 years and have grown up with him as part of their lives. The word "family" is used a number of times. This may or may not be true but it is intriguing to hear the different voices of the models in their prose. When they talk about the photos in which they appear, it often gives the impression of those photos speaking in a new voice. It gives these portraits a different flavor.

But I am ignoring the fact that this book is also, if not mainly, a book of photography. To be honest, I would have bought this book for the photo on the cover alone. Fortunately, there is more of Sturges' wonderful portrait work on the inside. His themes and the beauty of his work continue to interest me. I have been a fan of Sturges' work for nearly 20 years now and this book is a wonderful digression, especially for fans. I wouldn't send a newcomer to this book first, but it certainly has its place in Sturges' body of work.

Photographer Jock Sturges and publishing house/gallery Aperture have collaborated again [The Last Day of Summer 1993, Radiant Identities 1995] to bring us this fabulous new book 'Notes'. Here, as with the previous titles, Sturges' work is beautifully reproduced, 50 single black and white page, one single colour page, the cover photograph and numerous other colour polaroid and digital images scattered throughout the book. But for the first time in addition to the work we are given a glimpse, through statements and comments made by Jock and his subjects, into the working process and to the effect that being photographed by Jock has on the people that appear in his work. These commentaries are rich and rewarding. They open the door a little wider and more light comes flooding out. I have been collecting Jock's photographs and books for over a decade but I think that this book brings me closer to the experience of 'being there' than any of the other, Aperture, Scalo or Gakken titles. Except for one beautiful image of Celie from 1999 all of the work represented in this volume covers the period 2000-2003. Other 'fans' and collectors might be disappointed to find that there are only three images of Misty Dawn and only one of Fanny. Perhaps with the publication of this book Sturges and Aperture are marking the start of a new chapter in the development of the photographers' career. The reproductions themselves are richer and closer to the luxurient tones of the original prints. The binding is very nice too, no dust sleeve just a print directly onto the hard cover. The technicians and printers at Aperture have done a really good job.
Jock's world is the world of the naturist, those people who feel relaxed and comfortable being naked in situations where other people might feel shy or embarressed. Michelangelo wrote 'What spirit is so empty and blind that it cannot recognise the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe and the skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed.' Jock Sturges seems to be dedicating his life to proving this point and I think that he succeeds, radiantly. The people in his pictures are truely full of grace. And his pictures are a testament to their pure, calm, accepting way of life. These photographs are life affirming images created with love, affection and respect. They prove that Leonardo Da Vinci was right when he said that 'simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.'

Jock Sturges' latest book, Notes (Aperture, 2004), is both an appealing social document and an informative guide to his artistic methods. If the claim that he is `deeply interested in the lives of the people in my pictures' is to be taken seriously, then thinking about Sturges' images should involve thinking about naturism and the kinds of people who are naturists.

Australian poet Les Murray remarks that public nudity in Western cultures is `relaxed as exam time', but some such cultures do nudity better than others and attain genuine relaxation. I have always thought Australia with its Mediterranean climate and vast tracts of white beaches had great nudist potential, but my country had the misfortune to be born English. It has grown up with the general aspect of the working-class Pommy migrant made good, raised in cleaner air and living on a larger suburban block than was available `back home', more of a brash, materialist loudmouth than its native cousins, but still caught in all of their mental shackles.

America was born English too - a virulent, Puritanical strain of it - and in the text of Notes it is fascinating to read Sturges on his early life in that country, which he sums up as `a long tunnel of single-sex experience [at school and in the military] and social deprivation. . . . While I was young and my work was new, it was about hormones and photography.'

My own visit to one of France's largest nude beaches a few years ago confirmed my intuition that nakedness needn't be a big deal. This was middle-class Europe with its clothes off. One of my most electric memories of that week of mass strutting, playing, snoozing and posing nude under a heavy sun was of a father and his young adolescent son who jumped in the surf for a few minutes on a cool and windy morning. The vigorous, beautiful boy then marched out of the grey water, followed by his beer-bellied dad, picked up his towel and the pair drove away into an ordinary summer day. This earthiness could be achieved on beaches anywhere, but a certain lightness of being, having nothing to do with moral goodness, is necessary first.

The vitality and eroticism of the nudist ethos is captured in the best of Sturges' photographs. Photographed badly enough, naked people can turn out like slabs of raw meat or illustrations for a medical treatise, so there is much to admire in terms of practical skill in Notes, like all of Sturges' books. Diffused and directed light, even in outdoor settings, seems to be the photographer's most important tool. Notes shows clearly how the stiffness and exaggerated solemnity of the typical Sturges picture turns out to be a result of his method, which begins with polaroids taken from life as it is lived by his friends and family on nude beaches each summer, and ends in careful reconstructions of a model's certain gesture or stance. Yet as is so often the case in photography, the small, contrasty, from-the-hip colour polaroid is frequently more interesting than the large, high-definition, severely monochrome reconstruction that counts as the finished article. It seems to me an inherently difficult task to do a `decisive moment' over again.

Sturges' more recent work in colour is also represented in Notes. The finest example of these is the beautifully judged `Michelle, Montalivet, France, 2001', which loses none of his trademark serenity in the heat of its colour. In that image, a soft reflected mother-of-pearl - muted tones of grey-green, pink and purple from the girl's bedding - surrounds a young girl as she sits as quietly as a thinking buddha, bringing the heavy orangey colour of her naked skin into the compositional as well as subjective foreground. The image brings to mind curious analogies. After looking at it several times I remembered the stricken, lank-haired girl of Edvard Munch's Puberty; the prepubescent subject of `Michelle' is a much-lightened version of the Munch who is unlikely, when her own puberty comes, to suffer in the same way.

Sometimes, Sturges' books carry a tone of misplaced moralism or academicism. He seems to find it necessary to dress his models' actual nakedness with metaphysical justifications. In Notes a simple picture of a boy and girl holding hands (`Eva and Thomas, La Jenny, France 2002') is glossed at length with the photographer's comment that the scene is `Breugel-esque'. What possible connection the work of a sixteenth-century painter might have with the post-industrial leisure world of a nude beach is hard for me to see. Breughel's characters were never painted in such isolated detail and his most famous pictures are bucolic panoramas of villages in the dark of winter. It's significant that boys attract more of this commentary than girls. There are several images of boys in Notes, and their very inclusion is noteworthy since male nudity is such a taboo subject in English-speaking societies, no doubt because of the erotic excitement it arouses. Boys are never treated by Sturges in quite the same way as girls. Girls are taken as graceful and fascinating and sensual in themselves, but boys are just Breughel-esque, or interesting because they look like Michelangelo's David, or academic examples of Sturges' preferred photographic technique. They deserve to be valued for being beautiful too.

Academic or metaphysical interpretations of Sturges are not wrong, but unnecessary; naked bodies, sunlight and a beach are about as elemental as things get, and it is this bareness we find startling and interesting and full of sensual appeal, whether male or female.

So for all the liberating joie-de-vivre of Notes, a puritan strain remains, albeit mostly in the descriptive texts. I think this is a presently unavoidable outcome of having Americans write about being naked. The images themselves become silly with this moralism at times, too, with figures striving for a waxwork-like ideality. The collection in Notes is interesting as a document of a well-known artist's philosophy and technique and, by showing a world of middle-class naked people enjoying themselves, Sturges' work remains an important document from a sociohistorical point of view - his images demonstrate to puritan cultures that it is possible, given education and money enough for a long holiday each year, to cast off morals and remain a good person.

`It has taken two thousand years,' wrote Albert Camus in one of his own notebooks, `for us once again to be able to show the body naked on the beaches . . . [I]t has recovered its place in our customs.' He was writing more than a decade before the marshy beaches of Cap d'Agde in the south of France were drained and gradually developed into a seasonal nudist `city' of happy thousands. How lucky we are that a photographer of Sturges' abilities has the courage and the visual skill to document a world delightfully removed from, yet still a part of, the permanently clothed world in which most of us have chosen to live.

This is by far, the best Jock Sturges book to date. He once again has joined up with the Aperture Foundation for another monograph experience. But this book is a little bit different. Rather than a forward, followed by roughly seventy photographs, like his older titles, we look into the making of these photos. Which to me was an experience in itself.
For the first part of this book, we get the start of what turns out to be a short autobiography of Sturges, that appears randomly through the book. And then we get several polaroids and low megapixil camera images of many models we have grown to love. As you look at these very unprofessional images, burn them into your head and remember what they look like, because you will be seeing very professional images much like them later in the book.
The Second half of the book is a normal collection of photos that we see in all of Sturges' books. The beautiful duotone images of the naturist communities of France and California. It is here that you will start to see images you think you've seen before, but don't know where. Then you turn to the first part again, and realize that all the random polaroid snapshots have been turned into beautiful large format images. This is what is amazing. Sturges doesn't shoot large format like crazy. He shoots poloroids like crazy, and collects them all summer. Towards the end of the summer, she goes through them, and finds "accidental" poses and turns them into real art. Amazing.
Part Three of the book is a lot of commentary from the models themselves, even the loved Misty-Dawn Johnson. It is here that we get their view of Sturges and his works, and what they think of modeling with them and how it was growing up through the lens of his camera.
This book is incredible, and any fan of Sturges' works need to pick this up. Not since Ansel Adams' "The Making of Photographs" have we gotten a look into a masters eye like this. Again, only one word is needed. Amazing.

"People", too often, means the twenty-something, buff models carefully groomed for the camera. Come on. People are younger than that, and older, and have families, and don't always scrape off the fuzzy bits.

Sturges brings us an intriguing series of pictures. His polaroids are so casual that he can't remember where they came from. His "casual" shots, as shown on the back cover, are anything but. He alternates between color and b&w, as if violating some taboo on both sides.

Everyone is bare under their clothes, and naturist families think that's just silly - bare is bare. Sturges is a member of that extended family. Pictures, happy memories, and Sturges' most serious photos all come together, and the subjects work with him. According to the text, they thank him for capturing on film what they couldn't see in themselves.

This book presents honest pictures of families, kids, and even young love. The people in these pictures all like the pictures. They help make the pictures clear and true.

Being human is about the coolest thing anyone can do. Sturges, with the people who have come to trust him, are beautifully human.

//wiredweird

For the first time in a book, Jock gives an in depth behind the scenes look at how he performs his work. Included are notes from several of the models/Naturists talking about their experience as his models, including Misty Dawn. The color polaroids in the book present the human side of the characteristic Sturges photos which, while stunning, can be a bit stark.

I also recommend that fans of his work view the Naturist DVDs Amazon has like: "Castle Naturism" and "4th of July". These types of works may not be possible in the future. Camera equipment is no longer allowed on the beaches in Montalivet, the Southern French town in which Sturges photographs.

I've collected practically everything Jock Sturges has done in photo books, without exception they are good books.
Notes is different than Sturges' earlier works in that instead of just being a picture book this one is sort of a biographical account both of the photographer and of several of his subjects. Sturges tells something of how he got into photography and also tells a little about some of the photographs and the good times he's had with the people. Some of his subjects tell of their history with him, that's just as interesting. Misty Dawn, 26 at the time of the book's writing, had been a subject for 23 years- she says if she ever has children it will be wonderful for them as well. Misty was specifically requested for a fashion shoot Sturges did once, she must be one of his most popular subjects.
It seems to be common among Sturges' models (not all nude, some are male) to enjoy their posing for his work, you can see it in their eyes even in the test shots that Sturges shows here. These are either Polaroids or digital shots, some of them taken when the gang was all just fooling around- Sturges admits that in some cases he can't even remember who actually took some of them. Even most of these pictures are artworthy.
Just about the only thing I can find to complain about is that the book has no paper jacket that can be put into one of those plastic library sleeves. The book cover itself has pictures on it which makes it hard to keep such a nice book in good condition.
Beautiful work here, well worth owning- if you know Sturges work you won't regret getting this one, it might even be a good choice for a first time Sturges buyer.

As a photographer of interesting and often beautiful women, I found Jock Sturges' work both exciting and intriguing. I live in Europe but even in this social climate, the free intimacy Sturges invokes with his subjects is worth the efforts to understand this book. I would say that he evokes a natural intimacy that is usually absent from photography or the nudes shot by most photographers miss the wholesome quality evident in Sturges' images. The people are neither ashamed nor proud of their bodies...they inhabit them. I applaud his work and I will study this photos for years to come.

I am very pleased with the works of Jock Sturges. He takes us on a behind the scene tour of those that he takes pictures of. You will discover the close knit group of friends that come together to share in everyday life. He does a great job of capturing his subjects on film and his works are well worth your time. All subjects are in their natural settings and don't look fake like David Hamilton's!! Many of his subjects have known him for years and have a good relationship with Jock. Get them while they are hot!!!