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January 1998
Yesterday's Artists, Today's Pornographers
A 1981 graduate of Marlboro College in
Vermont, Jock Sturges holds an M.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. He works primarily in black and white, documenting the lives of naturists in
Northern California and Montalivet, France. (He was introduced to naturism by photographer Peter Simon, Carly Simon's younger brother, whose books include
Decent Exposures and The World Guide to Naturist
Beaches.) Many of his photographs are images of children, particularly girls. All the pictures were taken with the permission of parents who are themselves often present in the photographs. His work is in the permanent collections of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and other museums
worldwide. On April 25, 1990, Sturges's studio was raided and his negatives and
equipment impounded after a photo lab questioned some of the images in a roll of film he had left for developing; the resulting FBI investigation-- which sent agents to France at taxpayers' expense-- determined that there were
no grounds to prosecute Sturges.
A British expatriate based in France, David
Hamilton began his career in the 1960s as an graphic designer for
Elle magazine. He has since worked as art director for
Queen magazine and for Printemps, the Paris department store. Though his photographic work encompasses flowers, still lifes, and landscapes, Hamilton is best known for his painterly studies of young women and adolescent girls, nude and clothed. Closer to
fashion photography and advertising graphics than Jock Sturges's work, Hamilton's posed, idealized, Alice-in-Wonderland images have a more identifiably erotic subtext. Some of Hamilton's detractors dismiss his aesthetic
as "saccharine." As promotional material from Aspen, Colorado's Magidson Gallery points out, "There is no ugliness or pain in his work.... Hamilton is a lover of beauty." In the past 30 years, Hamilton has directed
several feature films (Bilitis, Tender
Cousins), and produced at least 16 books. His published work is usually presented in deluxe collectors' editions priced up to $300. The popular
Age of Innocence is a 214 page selection of over
200 prints. Hamilton's career has achieved greater recognition in Europe and in Asia (more than 75,000 people attended a Tokyo exhibition) than in America. Hamilton has nevertheless been widely exhibited here, receiving
a major retrospective at the Magidson Gallery in 1994. Though one airline magazine censored the ad for the show at that time, Hamilton's work seems never to have encountered legal problems or serious efforts to suppress
it anywhere in the U.S.-- until recently.
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