Jess Dugan utilizes their skilled observation and keen awareness of the dynamics of portraiture to pose questions on love, loss, risk, trust and belonging. Sixty poetic images possessed of affection and agency, are intermixed with poignant and highly personal prose, to create an object of beauty and an accompaniment to the trials and triumphs of a fully lived life. 

In this conversation, Jess Dugan discusses, among other things:

Following desire

Being led by attraction

Looking to pictures to learn

Regulating the emotional space of portraiture

Ethics of care

Practice as process

Protecting creative space

Expanding the gaze - beyond identity

Capturing ambiguity

Personal storytelling as a model of possibility

Referenced in the episode

Every Breath We Drew - Jess T Dugan 

To Survive on This Shore - Jess T Dugan, Vanessa Fabbre

Strange Fire Collective - Rafael Soldi, Jess T Dugan, Hamidah Glasgow, Zora J. Murff

Fine Arts Workshop Provincetown - Intimate Portraits led by Jess T Dugan

The Queer Indigenious Artists Reclaiming a Fluid Sense of Gender - The New York Times Style Magazine

Notes on Fundamental Joy - Carmen Winant

Brainstorm - Rebecca M. Jordan-Young

In Lieu of Flowers - Caleb Cole

Art After Stonewall 1969-1989 - Weinberg

Becoming Sisters: Women Photography Collective & Organizations

Jess Dugan Website | Instagram
Engage with J. Sybylla Smith  https://www.jsybyllasmith.com Instagram @jsybylla and Facebook @j.sybylla.smith

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