On April 25, 1990, San Francisco photographer Jock Sturges' life changed forever. On that day, police raided his studio and office. They confiscated cameras, film, prints, computers and records -- on the suspicion that Sturges was involved in the production and distribution of child pornography.
At issue were a series of portraits Sturges had taken at naturist communities in California and France. These are tender, black-and-white studies of women and children, most shot outdoors. The pictures, taken with the subjects' full cooperation, document an alternative lifestyle that has long been regarded with a mixture of curiosity and amusement by mainstream society. Generally speaking, most artists and photographers regard Sturges' large-format work as being inspired, well-composed and finely executed. His work is in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art. The problem is, pedophiles like it, too.
Although a grand jury refused to indict Sturges following that 1990 police raid, he again found himself at the center of a nationwide debate on art, sexuality and censorship in 1998, after a series of protests were organized by the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue (now known as Operation Save America, one of their latest tracts is titled "Abortion is Murder, Homosexuality is Sin, Islam is a Lie"). Operation Rescue launched a letter-writing campaign and encouraged people to deface or destroy in-store copies of Sturges' books, specifically "The Last Days of Summer" (1993) and "Radiant Identities" (1995). The zealots' main target was booksellers Barnes & Noble, who carried what Operation Rescue termed "Sturges' illegal child pornography."