For me — no matter how they define summer in the United States and elsewhere — summer starts on 1 June and ends on 31 August. Therefore, today is the last day of summer.
This also is the title of the first collection of photographs by Jock Sturges, published in 1991. These beautiful black and white photos were shot mostly in Northern California and Montalivet, France, between 1978 and 1990. Finally, the two photos there are also entitled Last Day of Summer #1 and Last Day of Summer #2. The excerpts from the afterword by Sturges explain the title.
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Often I photograph people who are at an age at which, in my own life, I was least happy. Time and again my few good friends would disappear from the schools and summer camps I attended, swept away by time, by the end of terms and semesters, by the end of summer. And very often I’d never see them again. From the onset I photographed my friends almost exclusively, because the prints somehow kept them for me. And since then most all of my portrait projects have begun with kids the same age I was then. I have evolved as a social, intellectual, and sexual human being in no small part by virtue of having experienced photographically the span of maturation in others so many times. I often spend weeks and in some cases months with my subjects. Toward the end of that time, a certain urgency builds, because soon they will leave, and I am going to lose them anew. I make my best work the last days of summer. Anytime I photograph a person, there is loss implicit in the image, because the next time I photograph them, they will have changed. Jock Sturges
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