Color images have the capacity to create an immediacy of time and place as opposed to black-and-whites timelessness.

Several monographs of his work are available in major bookstores, and the images are in the collections of major institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; The Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

However, the work is not without controversy: the nascent erotic quality of his frequent subjectsnude adolescent and pubescent girlsis a magnet for close-minded individuals and suspect voyeurs.

An FBI attempt to indict him in the 1990s led to an outburst of support throughout the nation.

In spite of his past legal battles, he continues to work with his models to this day, but moving forward past the notoriety of that moment was perhaps the most difficult process of all.

Now with workshops, exhibits, new books on the way and decades of working with the same models and their families, he focuses on the work, not on the legal threats of a virulent and damaged minority.

You were barely out of your teens when you signed up with the Navy and became an instructor of photography as well as a Russian interpreter.

Where and when did you acquire these skills at such a tender age.

I was also stationed in Monterey, California, in 1966 for a year where I benefited from the tutelage of a woman named Ellen Ross Gibson.

She ran the special services photo lab at the Defense Language Institute where I was studying Russian, and luckily for me was one of the best teachers I have ever known.

She knew Ansel Adams and Wynn Bullock and dragged me over to their studios on a number of occasions.

I remember getting into an extended argument with Mr.

He was right, of course, but it took me another decade to figure that out on my own.

The arrogance of youth does make so many things take longer than they should really have to.

Was it in college that you discovered your special interest in photographing particularly young women and girls in the nude.

The first 23 years of my life had in fact exposed me hardly at all to the opposite sex.

When I found myself in the wonderfully liberal and emphatically co-ed context of Marlboro after years of all male schools and camps followed by four years in the military, I was instantly riveted by a fascination that endures to this day.

Years later when I went to the Art Institute in Seattle for a Masters degree, I was constantly puzzled by students wondering what to do in art.

I knew. I should say, though, that it would be almost seven more years before photography of people without clothes began to dominate my work.

You are well known for your use of a very large 8 x 10 view camera and fine black-and-white prints.

The view camera is a fairly cumbersome and imposing device for taking portraits in the landscape.

If I do not have a major tripod adjustment I can usually make a picture in just a few seconds.

Not using a light meter helps with that as does almost always working with the same lens, so that I know instinctively where to place the camera and what position of focus will be required.

That being said, my images are still more static than the works of people done in motion with small formats.

The images thus become more formal statements of identity and of the moment in time and light when the subject and I paused to craft a deliberate memory.

The Last Day Of Summer Sturges