Jock Sturges: The Last Days of Summer: Photographs by Jock Sturges

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In 2021, Sturges pled guilty in Franklin County (MA) Superior Court to an unnatural and lascivious act with a child under 16 when he was a dorm head at the Northfield Mount Hermon School in the mid-1970s. He was sentenced to three years' probation. [9] [10] [11] Publications [ edit ] Publications by Sturges [ edit ] Sturges primarily works with a large 8x10-inch-format view camera. He has taken some digital photographs but prefers to work with film. [3] This March, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. will open “Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings,” an exhibition of around 115 photographs culled from Mann’s over 40-year career. The southern landscape plays a starring role, whether the photographs are of Civil War battlefields or Mann’s children. A deep sense of drama derives from shadows and light on historically fraught land. “Despite her great talent and prominence...the full range of her work had not yet received sufficient and widespread critical and scholarly attention,” says exhibition curator Sarah Greenough.

Perring, Christian (2009). "Review – Misty Dawn". Metapsychology Online Reviess. Archived from the original on May 9, 2017 . Retrieved February 23, 2013. When questioned regarding the prosecution, Sturges stated it would waste taxpayers' money, as the photographs "are not done flirtatiously" and have been displayed in major museums. [6] Sturges responded to the indictment labelling the books as "obscene material containing visual reproduction of persons under 17 years of age involved in obscene acts" by stating "This is pretty chilling language because, in fact, the people in my pictures are not engaged in any acts at all. They are living in contexts that are naturist, which is to say that when it's warm and people feel like it, they don't wear clothes", [7] also stating "To find the work obscene, you'd have to find homo sapiens between 1 and 17 inherently obscene, and I find that obscene." [5] a b Boxer, Sarah (March 4, 1998). "Critic's Notebook; Arresting Images of Innocence (or Perhaps Guilt)". The New York Times . Retrieved February 17, 2013. Defending her work, Mann stresses the dramatic nature of the photographs and their separation from reality. “These are not my children; they are figures on a silvery paper slivered out of time,” she wrote over two decades later. “I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made.” She cites Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Paul Gauguin as artists whose works shouldn’t be disregarded due to their less-than-angelic lives. (If Mann could dismiss the articles and the letters, more frightening was the stalker her work attracted. One man wrote to the children’s school—in addition to editors and journalists—asking for more information about them. Both Mann and at least one of her children suffered sleepless nights in fear of their own safety.)In the early 1990s, photographer Sally Mann transformed one of the most banal elements of family life—the sentimental photo album—into discomfiting, divisive, and ultimately unforgettable artwork. For her series “Immediate Family,” she shot her three children (Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia) in vulnerable positions at their summer home in rural Virginia. The ensuing criticism the images received questioned the line between pornography and fine art and problematized the objectification of children.

Within three months, the book sold out its printing of 10,000 copies. Mann’s children became ever more visible. While they enjoyed being photographed at the time, there was no telling how their opinions of the experience would develop. Mann recalls taking her children to a psychologist to assess the impact her series was having on them; he thought they were just fine. His subjects are nude adolescents and their families, primarily taken at communes in Northern California and at the Atlantic-coast naturist resort CHM Montalivet in Vendays-Montalivet. Much of his work features California resident Misty Dawn, whom he shot from when she was a child until in her twenties. [2]

The timing of Mann’s initial unveiling of “Immediate Family” situated her work within larger discussions about morality in photography. In 1989, U.S. senators Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms railed against artist Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Immersion (Piss Christ), which depicts a plastic figurine of Jesus on a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s urine. The artist had indirectly received partial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to exhibit the work, and the senators wanted to prevent similarly “obscene” art from receiving government money. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. subsequently cancelled an exhibition of sexually explicit photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, which had also received NEA funds. In 1990, the director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, Dennis Barrie, went to trial for obscenity after the museum displayed Mapplethorpe’s portraits of semi-nude children and BDSM practices. (He was acquitted later that year.)