[Photo/China Daily]

"They have to trust me, and I trust them. It has to take that long before there is a relationship."

Therefore, for the Rollei Project filmed with the title camera and stretched for three months in 2012, the subjects are understandably those whom Sturges knows very well - including his daughter, his daughter's best friends and long-time neighbors.

Most of them are naturalists. And they bare themselves to Sturges, both their bodies and inner selves.

With that familiarity, the photographer can do away with wasted film. "I only take one shot of each picture I take," he says.

He boasts the ability to find the relationship between any photographer and subjects.

Taking one of his own pictures as example, where two little ones stare curiously and without smiling into the camera, Sturges expresses his dissatisfaction with it.

"We've known each other for only a year. You can see it in their eyes that they're still a little on guard. But I'll do another one next year, and it will get better."

With forming sincere relationships as his aim, it's easy for him to point out the pictures that will have a lasting impression, too. "It's the human relationship that touches, not sugar and surface beauty. That's why you put away magazines," he says.

Tian Zhili, the curator, has arranged all the pictures in an album in the studio, a first for Sturges' pictures.

"Each of the photos are so innocent and intimate, I don't want to ditch any single piece," Tian says.

"Sturges' works are classic, simple, direct and so charming that one is always moved at the sight of them. They're the presentations of life."

sunye@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 10/11/2013 page18)