I found this exceptional interview with Jock Sturges, one of the masters of photography - an artist that I immensely admire. Read this fragment - for the rest of this interview follow the link.
What is the contrast between the intent of your work and the perception of your work?
That is an impossible question to answer because perception varies in every individual, and, more broadly, in every culture. There can only ever be differing perceptions of just what any given body of work or individual art object is. The range of possibilities is near infinite. What one person or group finds unlovely, another might consider transcendent, another shocking, another dull. It is finally not my responsibility nor of any great interest to me to address the external perception of my work at all. But I do not seek to please nobody. Not at all. I want first of all to please the people in my pictures and then, close behind, myself. If my work pleases the people it depicts and meets my own standards then I am done asking questions of it.
As far as I know, my work has never in any instance been found problematic by individuals or social systems in Europe. In the early '90, during the federal investigation into my work in the states (USA), the FBI tried to persuade the French to investigate me based on their characterization of my photographs as problematic. The French police wrote them back and said "Not only are such pictures not illegal in France, we actually think they are quite beautiful". In the European context, the norm is a sexual maturity that surpasses that of many Americans by a significant margin.
I will say, however, that over the past two decades the intent behind my work has grown to incorporate a modicum of political ambition. Pathologically obsessive interest in humans very often derives from what is hidden, forbidden, not seen. My work hides nothing, conceals nothing and thus in time should hopefully work against such illness. Or so I would like to admire.
Seattle, 2009
Read the rest of this very important interview here:
http://interviewwithanartist.com
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