Jock Sturges and beauty
Jock Sturges and beauty
In the summer of 2007, we travelled to the French Atlantic Coast to meet an artist whose images stand out from the diverse pool of contemporary photography. His subject matter is the human being. His tool is a large format camera. His goal is the depiction of nothing less than beauty.
He demands the truth from his photographs. For over 30 years, the American photographer Jock Sturges has dealt with beauty and truth, an idea of art, unfortunately, which is often scorned today. In order to recognize and appreciate that, which distinguishes his work, we must focus on the definition of beauty.
Beauty is first and foremost an abstract definition, a concept, difficult to determine. It has always been governed by history and culture. However, there is a certain degree of global consensus concerning to the notion of beauty. Not only do we define physical matter, such as humans, animals, plants or objects as beautiful, but also abstractions, such as ideas or the notion of the soul. Even Schiller in his essay “Kallias, or on the Beautiful” attempted to define beauty by means of deduction. He concluded, however, that a definition was impossible without the experience of beauty itself. And surely, at one time or another, we have all experienced some form of beauty. When we think of beauty, an individual picture quickly takes form in our minds. This picture, it seems, has something to do with a certain harmony in proportions, in symmetry, in its ability to move us. In the end, it is the precise definition of beauty that remains imprecise.
Jock Sturges. Marie-Sophie.
