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The Eye Mama book is a photographic portfolio showcasing the mama narrative and the mama gaze, what female and non-binary photographers see when they look at, and into the home. Now, on the second level, there's what happens after the photographs are made. But I no longer control that. It's not at all hard for me to imagine that there are some aspects of society that will buy my book, buy my photographs, who will look at them and have 'impure thoughts.' There are also people out there who buy shoe ads and Saran Wrap and all manner of things, who have impure thoughts. I can't really do anything about those people, except hope that, if they attend to my work closely enough, that ultimately they'll come to realize that these are real people. Sturges: Well, yes and no. My work was doing pretty well, and now it is doing dramatically better. Is that because people are collecting the pictures because of their notoriety? Or is that simply because people are more aware of the work, and like it, having become aware of it? I don't know. I'll never get to know. Grand Jury Indicts Barnes & Noble for Books Depicting Nude Children". Los Angeles Times. February 19, 1998 . Retrieved February 19, 2013. My hope is that the 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 and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it. That's of no interest to people who make pinup photography. They don't care who the woman is, what tragedies or triumphs that person's life might encompass. That's of absolutely no relevance.
People need to realize that a cultural war has been declared here," Sturges says strongly. "A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don't know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population. This represents a whole new level of attention to the arts by repressive forces. It's very scary, and it has to be withstood." Sterngold, James (September 20, 1998). "Censorship in the Age of Anything Goes; For Artistic Freedom, It's Not the Worst of Times". The New York Times . Retrieved February 17, 2013.
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It's laughable, and we'll win these cases, however far it has to go," Sturges continues. "If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art. If obscenity is simply a matter of somebody being without clothes, then there are so many other things that would be inherently obscene--medical books, the National Geographic. We're really blind in this country. People don't see the extraordinary inconsistencies. I think the average age for the loss of virginity for female children in this country now is like 14 1/2 or 15. There's this vast epidemic of unwed mothers and teenage mothers, and yet we have an 18-year-old age of consent which makes them all felons. If the age of consent were lower, and you could talk to these children intelligently and not have to worry about school boards and PTAs going apoplectic if you mention the word condom, let alone sex and making people intelligent about it, probably we'd have a whole lot more intelligent take on the whole thing. As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon.
Metro: Another photographer I know who has worked with teenagers and young women says that sometimes he's concerned that he may be leading these people in a difficult direction because they get so much into how they look that then they get into the whole glamour/model thing.
The book that I have worked on for the past four years is a photographic re-creation of the intersections and divergences of my father’s secret life and the traditional paternal role he played. The project consists of vernacular photographs, new captures and ephemera to tell a story and investigate a childhood mystery. Ironically, several of the archival photos in the project were photographed by me and my father on separate trips to West Berlin in the winter of 1961 but were only rediscovered recently. The Need to Know is the intersection of the factual and fictional based upon historical research, family archives, my memories, and my imagination. Some of these people were bugged by the FBI in the worst imaginable way. They were interviewed very, very aggressively. They're all still willing to let me take their pictures; they think the FBI was completely full of it. Metro: Having been through all that you've been through, I can't imagine how you can take photographs now without having legal concerns somewhere in your mind. The following interview was conducted with Sturges in his San Francisco home by writer David Steinberg, who writes frequently about the culture and politics of sex. My father was a spy during the Cold War. Bilingual in German and English, he worked for the U.S. Air Force and sent agents into East Germany and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1960s. The Need to Know, a photo book, is my exploration of the meager details that emerged from brief and cryptic conversations with my father and my curiosity about Cold War espionage and its impact upon my family at the time. The book will be published by the Blow Up Press of Warsaw, Poland in early October.
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