Callout: My hope is that my work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body, fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it. People who make pinup photographs don't care who the woman is, what tragedies or triumphs that person's life might encompass. My work hopefully works exactly counter to that. My ambition is that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is. --Jock Sturges, the Boston Phoenix

Long known for his radiant black-and-white naturist portraiture, Jock Sturges has also been quietly working in color for more than two decades. Life Time presents a broad range of this color work for the first time and carries forward Sturges' extended portraits of families in Northern California counter-culture communities and on French naturist beaches. Working with the same models and their families in his long-term studies of growth, change and relationship, his large format images borrow significantly from classical periods in both photography and nineteenth and early twentieth century painting. The large color plates in Life Time represent almost perfect one to one translations of the original transparencies and are rich with detail and physical and psychological nuance. Sturges describes his work as "identity driven" because his portraits represent collaborations that stretch over entire lifetimes. The confident ease with which all of his subjects present themselves to his camera evidences a rare level of trust and friendship.

Jock Sturges (born 1947) is an American photographer, best known for his images of adolescents, often taken nude. His work, often taken on the nude beaches of California and France, has been the subject of controversy.

Sturges was born in New York City, and worked in San Francisco for many years. He graduated with a BFA in Perceptual Psychology and photography from Marlboro College in 1974, and received an MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985. He now resides in Seattle, Washington.