Art chasing life

Sturges and the properties of time

by Charles Taylor

JOCK STURGES. Photographs by Jock Sturges. Scalo, 208 pages, $65.

Any time I photograph a person, there is loss implicit in the image . . .

-- Jock Sturges

. . . the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks -- of an enchanted isle haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast misty sea.

-- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Given the controversy that swirls around the work of Jock Sturges, it might seem that I'm making a snide joke by juxtaposing his remark with one from literature's most famous pedophile, Humbert Humbert. But there's no way to write about Sturges without confronting the nudge-nudge, wink-wink snideness you encounter when you profess admiration for a photographer whose subjects are mainly nude adolescent and preadolescent girls.

Lolita is the tragedy of a man who wants to live life through art. Sturges's photos are the work of a man who sees his art as a thing that chases after the flow of life. Humbert dreams of arresting time in an Edenic Neverland of girl-spirits who never leave the magic age at which they possess the power to bewitch him. The implicit subject of Sturges's work is his melancholy acceptance of the passage of time, the loss that he speaks of. Sturges, who photographs the people and families he has befriended in the naturist communities of Northern California and coastal France, does most of his work in summer, the ripest and most transitory of seasons. In the midst of summer, we think of it the way we think of youth when we're young: as boundless. But the longest day of the year comes in the first week of summer, and the days begin shortening right after that.

The most striking thing about the photos in the new monograph Jock Sturges (from an exhibit at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main) may be the sense of what time doesn't change. Look at the photos here of Misty Dawn, a skinny, fair-haired girl with impossibly long limbs, taken over a period of 12 years and following her from childhood to adolescence. There is no way in which the young woman we see in the later photographs is not present in her as a child. She has a way of meeting the gaze of Sturges's camera that, without a shred of provocation or hostility, seems to lay down a challenge to the photographer to capture as strong a sense of her as she has of herself. Even when she stands with her eyes closed, her arms either behind her head, arching her body forward, or by her side with palms open, there's no point at which she isn't totally at ease with herself. The paradox of Sturges's photography is that even as we watch his subjects come to define who they are -- the same look or way of holding the body passing from child to adult, and in some cases getting passed on to the subjects' children -- he reminds us of the human capacity for mutability.

This is, I suspect, what causes otherwise intelligent people to flip out when they see the unembarrassed frankness of Sturges's young models, and his undisguised enchantment with their beauty. Sturges's photos gently but firmly refute one of our culture's most cherished fantasies -- the notion that children are not sexual beings -- just as his choice of subject matter prevents him from denying his attraction to them. Photographers and painters are not often drawn to what they're not attracted to. And it's absurd not to acknowledge the budding lushness of Flore, the contradiction between her downcast eyes and the way she holds her torso proudly toward the camera. Or to ignore the way the grainless clarity of Sturges's prints (far better in this monograph than in either of his previous collections, The Last Day of Summer and Radiant Identities) makes you aware of the feel of sand and water and beds of dried leaves, and the pine needles on the luminescent skin of his models. In one image, the almond-eyed Minna poses over her sleeping dog, and you perceive the rising and falling of the animal's fur against her stomach.

How can you not be struck by the beauty of these young women? It's important to remember, though, that attractions are not actions. Sturges's working relationship is one of implicit trust. Eschewing release forms, he gets permission from his subjects each time a picture is exhibited or published. "Either I stay in touch with people or I don't deserve to use their pictures," he says flatly.

Filmmakers like Godard and Chris Marker have long been preoccupied with images as the inadequate tokens of memory. I'm thinking of Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, or Marker's Sans Soleil, in which the director asks, "I wonder how people who don't [video]tape can remember anything?" Jock Sturges has made peace with that inadequacy. The photos that seem to capture his subjects' essence are possessed of a silvery fluidity that keeps them from becoming frozen moments. Sturges's marvelous photos point to what isn't contained in them: the spaces between.