Since any given book of Sturges's is just another installment in his lifelong photographic project, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to talk about his new monograph outside the context of the rest of his work. So, a brief overview. Jock Sturges counts among his friends a number of families in the naturist communities of northern California (specifically Siskiyou County, as best I can determine) and in Montalivet, France. (He also does work elsewhere — Photo-Eye recently put up a selection of his photographs from Ireland — but an overwhelming majority of his published work is from northern California and Montalivet.) Sometimes the photos depict parents with their children, but more often it's just the children; sometimes the photos depict boys and girls, but more often it's just the girls. Sturges doesn't tell them what to do, where to stand or how to pose, but occasionally tells them to freeze so he can set up his large-format 8x10 camera and get off a few quick shots while the light is just so; nor does he tell them what to wear or not wear, but because his subjects are naturists and the photos are taken in the summer, they're usually naked. So most of his photos are of naked girls under the age of eighteen.

Consequently, Sturges has had his studio raided by the FBI, his equipment and negatives impounded and destroyed. Eight grand juries have been asked to indict him on charges of child pornography; all have refused to do so. Operation Rescue and similar groups have marched into bookstores and destroyed Sturges's books the way Muslim fundamentalists used to do with The Satanic Verses. So, to summarize: make a movie about guys in sunglasses blasting each other apart with machine-gun fire, make a fortune. Take a fine-art portrait of a fifteen-year-old on a nude beach, have your career and indeed your very freedom repeatedly threatened. God bless America, etc.

Even many of those who don't want Sturges thrown in jail cast aspersions on his work. They lump his work in with that of David Hamilton, which is fairly damning, Hamilton's photos being Vaseline-smeared portraits of anonymous pubescent girls half-wearing ballerina outfits. And he's often unfavorably compared to Sally Mann, whose nude photographs of her own three children have attracted their share of controversy — "but Mann's photos reflect a parental gaze," these detractors contend, "while Sturges's photos are those of a man looking at the naked bodies of someone else's daughters! Why, he probably thinks they're attractive!" Well, er, duh. It's not like the guy flipped a coin to decide whether to devote his life to female adolescence or to tropical fish; it's pretty clear from his work and from his public statements that Sturges is fascinated by women and consequently feels compelled to document the process by which they come to be.

This is also, to a certain extent, my project. My first book followed a group of kids from birth to high school (skipping around in time); the one I'm working on now tracks a different group of kids, one at a time, in a much more linear fashion, from preschool to college. Of course, I work in prose, so I deal with the formation and development of the way my young people act and think; Sturges, working in a still visual medium, captures the evolution of self through the physical: how his young people carry themselves, the slants of their hipbones, the looks in their eyes. Still, the overlap is substantial, and this is the primary reason I'm drawn to Sturges's work. My dream book would be a Jock Sturges monograph chronicling the childhood and adolescence of Echo and Molly Mockery, of Peggy and Kelly Kaylin, of September and April Young, of Daisy Warner and Rachel Monihan and Cat Nicholls and Hayley Kerensky and Siren Delaney. I know what they all say and know what they all do, but my visualization skills are sketchy enough that I haven't actually seen them grow up.

Of course, it doesn't help that Sturges's work is virtually the only place in our culture where the physical metamorphosis from child to adult plays out, on record, outside of a textile cocoon. Because what has our culture decided is the most obscene sight, that which must be hidden from us at all costs? We are. How sick and self-loathing is that? Of course, the usual justification for the nudity taboo is that nudity = sex and therefore should be kept between you and your partner — and, as a corollary, that under-18 nudity = under-18 sex = statutory rape. Of course, this is all circular logic: our culture associates nudity with sex because just about the only time most people in our culture see other people naked is in a sexual context; and the reason that we generally only see other people naked in a sexual context is because our culture associates nudity with sex and therefore prohibits it in other contexts. Catch-22. But experience shows that the association is purely a cultural one. The Arawaks went about their business completely naked most of the time and yet Arawak life somehow managed to avoid devolving into an endless orgy. Go to a clothing-optional beach; you'll find that the brain stops registering naked bodies as noteworthy after about three minutes. For that matter, if you're in a relationship with someone, get used to seeing each other naked in mundane contexts (making lunch, sitting around watching TV, tapping away on the computer) and you'll quickly find that your urge to jump one another will be totally orthogonal to how much or little you happen to be wearing. Or, flip through a Jock Sturges book. "Hey, that's a naked person" quickly becomes "That's a person" — and other pictures one might happen upon elsewhere morph from "That's a person" to "That's a person hiding her body in clothing" or "That's a person's head, hands and a bunch of fabric." And that's an epiphany our entire culture direly needs to experience.

This, then, is the second reason I'm drawn to Sturges's work — by presenting photographs of naked people, not as pictures of bodies to fantasize about, but as people to wonder about and watch grow over time, Sturges delivers eloquent testimony on behalf of naturism, which is a cause I believe in and a philosophy I practice. Clothing is, for the most part, pretty dumb. Yes, it's quite handy for protection from the elements, good stuff to have on when the mercury's dipped below freezing or when you're carrying a leaky car battery across town. Otherwise, bleah. Even if you don't find the sensation of being swaddled up in cloth intrinsically uncomfortable (I do — having to bundle up just to go to the store is enough of a bother that sometimes I'd rather just go hungry) there's the opportunity cost: the breeze on bare skin on a warm summer day brings with it much, much, much joy. And there's a laundry list (pun sort of intended, I guess) of other harms. The culling of the types of bodies presented to public view warps most people's body image. The creation of unnecessary clothing wastes countless hours of people's time, both of those who spend their days in sweatshops making it and those who work for money and then spend that money on clothes. There's the tribalism of fashion, people defining themselves by how they dress, basing their senses of self around commodity choices. I could go on, but I'm already well into one of the monologues that Allen warned Siren about in my book, so I think I'll back out while I still can.

So Jock Sturges's work is an exploration of adolescence and a tribute to naturism — hey, I'm sold. But it's also just plain nice to look at. There is much aesthetic pleasure to be reaped from his books. Of course, art that focuses on the beauty of the human form splashes around in the zone where appreciation and attraction blend together. In court, defenders of artists who venture into this area — not just Sturges, but Mapplethorpe and others — have had to testify to the photographs' compositional strengths, discuss the interplay of light and shade, and generally focus on the formal aspects of the photos as if they were of bicycles or waterfalls rather than people. And all these formal aspects are there! But that's only part of the story. Take my Windows background, JW Waterhouse's 1896 painting Hylas and the Nymphs. Part of the pleasure in the painting comes from the formal aspects, the glorious balance of colors, the arrangement of the figures. Some of it comes from the narrative content, the resonances with Greek myth. And a lot of it comes from the fact that those nymphs are awfully nice-looking. The pleasure of the painting as a whole comes not from simply adding these aspects together, but multiplying them by one another — and so it is with Sturges. Narrative content — a moment captured in the story of a person's life, one of many moments delivered to us over the years — is a multiplicand; formal aesthetics is another. And a third is the fact that the girls are nice to look at. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I've been to grad school; I've taken classes in image theory; I've heard the arguments about voyeurism and the objectifying male gaze. These photos are the opposite of objectifying. Which doesn't mean that there aren't people who buy Sturges's books for prurient reasons, who use it as porn even though it's not. But then, people use Sears catalogs as porn. Somewhere out there there are undoubtedly people who have wanked to Waterhouse, to the Mona Lisa, to the racy bits of the Book of Genesis. Perhaps Randall Terry should lead his band of thugs into his local Barnes & Noble and destroy copies of these works as well.

Hmmm. That overview was not so brief. Ah well. On to the book review.

Jock Sturges's latest release, New Work 1996-2000, is his fifth published monograph. His first two, The Last Day of Summer (1991) and Radiant Identities (1994), were published by Aperture of New York, and frankly leave a lot to be desired; the photos presented are a fairly random assortment of Sturges's output in a given period, emphasizing individual images and drawing attention away from the connections among them. Contrast this with the sequencing in Evolution of Grace (1994), published by Gakken of Japan:

The Aperture collections hopscotch around from subject to subject and year to year; the Gakken concentrates on one subject at a time, following her from one year to the next. Luckily, it is the latter course that the eponymous monograph Jock Sturges (1996) takes. At over 200 pages, this is the definitive collection of Sturges's work up to 1995, with most every subject getting at least a three-photo sequence devoted to her and some of them — notably Misty Dawn, Minna, Marine, Pauline, and Bettina — receiving extended sequences carrying them from childhood to late adolescence (sometimes beyond) in carefully measured steps. And by acting as a keystone, this monograph (courtesy of the Swiss publisher Scalo) adds retroactive value to the earlier ones, indicating where the scattered photos from earlier volumes need to be placed to extend the sequence: the Misty Dawn photos in Summer and Identities undergo an alchemical transformation from interesting pictures scattered among some less interesting ones of other people from roughly the same period into critical pieces of the Misty Dawn cycle that just happen to have been segregated into different volumes. The Scalo collection also brings together some of the series Sturges has done using the same model in the same place with a similar pose, reducing the variables to the point that the viewer can't help but zero in on the delta: what's different? This is The Question, after all — what's identity? What stays the same over time and what's evanescent? Consider a pair of images of Misty Dawn stretched out on an abandoned construction vehicle, a Caterpillar D7, the first from 1988 (age 8 or 9), the second from 1995 (age 15ish). Look at her right hand. In 1988 it's relaxed, dangling loosely, her wrist resting on her hip; in 1995 it's artificially posed, betraying a tenseness in dramatic contrast to the placidity of the first picture. (Of course, the fact that her eyes are closed in the second photo certainly doesn't detract from the impression that she's less open to the viewer this time around.) There's a similar twinning between a 1991 image of Misty Dawn in Evolution, knee-deep in a river, likely a fork of the Salmon, arms loose at her sides, hair a wild, choppy tangle, and a 1995 image from Sturges of her knee-deep in the same river, hair just so, arms clenched tightly behind her back, scowling up at the lens. Much the same way you are probably scowling at the way I've gone on for several pages without actually getting to the book I'm ostensibly reviewing.

The title of New Work 1996-2000 suggests that this might be a return to the Aperture formula, organized by the principle of "oh, and here's another photo from this batch of years." Luckily, New Work hews much more closely to the model of its immediate predecessor — this is also a Scalo book, and they seem to have a handle on what works. Each subject's pictures are grouped together and arranged chronologically. But Scalo has also not been averse to making improvements. The book is, as noted, considerably bigger than its predecessors; it's also more handsome, the halftone dots an order of magnitude less noticeable than in previous volumes (I can just barely detect them, and only with my eye practically touching the page and staring at the featureless bits of the photos, blank skies and such.) There is also a set of eight color pictures that are absolutely gorgeous, the palettes just heartbreakingly lovely. Sturges has said in the past that he works in black and white because it brings out the metaphorical side of the scenes depicted, allows the photos to portray not just this person or that, but Innocence and Grace. Scott McCloud has made similar claims about b&w vs. color comics. But let's say just for the sake of argument that the color photos deliver less in the way of metaphorical content. What they deliver in its place is the sheer BLISS of color! The pastel primaries of page 79, pink beige and baby blue; the saturation of the secondaries on page 82, orange purple and green; the limited palette of page 84, all lavenders; the reduced palette of page 77, peach white green and gray; color, color, color, color that melts into joy as effortlessly as a Kurt Cobain riff. Color!

But the most noteworthy thing about New Work 1996-2000 is simply this: Sturges's cast is all grown up. His girls are now women in their late teens and twenties, and the issues that characterized Sturges's work in the period covered by his earlier volumes have mostly been resolved. (Just to touch on a few of them quickly: there's androgyny, with some girls identifiable as girls when they're specks in the deep background, and others who look so boyish as to prompt double-takes; one picture of Marine, so obviously a boy even with her primarily sexual characteristics in plain view, gave me the confidence to declare authoritatively that Echo Mockery's hockey team had no idea she was a girl — and yet Marine herself a couple years later looks more like Peggy Kaylin than not. Then there are the first and second derivatives of adolescence; if adolescence is a transition, what do we call the transition to it? Look at the cover of Radiant Identities: Misty Dawn hasn't started developing yet, no not quite yet, but somehow we know that she's going to start in about four seconds. How? And the divergent paths of adolescence, Misty Dawn coltish long after puberty, Christina wearing a woman's shape long before it... but I said "a few" and "quickly", so I guess I have to hold myself to it.) New Work is not an exploration of adolescence, but a celebration of adolescence successfully navigated. Take Misty Dawn, back on the Caterpillar D7 in 1999, no longer coltish, no longer tense and scowling, no longer trying to look like a badass — she doesn't have to, because at this point she radiates such effortless strength and power that any playacting would be counterproductive. Thus endeth the springtime of her life and beginneth the summer. And meanwhile, many pages feature one Adèle, not yet born at the time of previous installments of Sturges's work; perhaps her adolescence will be the focus of a sequence in Jock Sturges's New Work 2008-2012. Time will tell, and Sturges will assist in the telling.

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