'The romantic ephemerality suggested in these sensually candid images places them within a great pictorial and poetic tradition... [Dugan's] frank, fluid approach to depicting queer affection leaves room for a more complex and beautiful human experience, at odds with the erasures and reductions of our banal binary culture.' Artforum
 
 
 
'Dugan pares portraits down to their essentials, dispensing with props, sets and other embellishments to highlight the humanity of the sitter... A scholar and a layperson could look at a Dugan portrait and come away with the same experience: one of profound intimacy, of seeing someone being seen.' Artnet
 
 
 
"Jess T. Dugan's intimate project is grounded in trust and collaboration... reflecting on what it means to live authentically with oneself despite incredible challenges." It's Nice That
 
 
 
"There are so many things I cannot say in my photographs, although everything is there, just beneath the surface, if you know what to look for."
 
 
 
In Look at me like you love me, Jess T. Dugan reflects on desire, intimacy, companionship and the ways these experiences shape our identities. In this deeply personal collection of work, Dugan brings together self-portraits, portraits of individuals and couples, and still lifes, interwoven with diary-like writings reflecting on relationships, solitude, family, loss, healing and the transformations that define a life. Dugan has long used photography to understand their own identity and connect with others on a deeper level. Their slow, collaborative working process reveals moments of heightened psychological intensity in images that transcend the specifics of a particular person or place, exploring what it means to know oneself alongside and through others. Using medium-format cameras and natural light, Dugan employs traditional photographic practices to depict these contemporary subjects, resulting in images that evoke and reinvent the conventional dynamics of art-historical portraiture. Gathered here, these photographs function both as an extended, oblique self-portrait and as a catalogue of friends and loved ones. Through a diffuse yet carefully considered sequence of images and texts, Look at me like you love me directs our attention towards one of the most powerful and complex forms of intimacy: seeing and being seen.