There’s an almost jarring sense of intimacy as you wander through photographer Jess T. Dugan’s Every breath we drew exhibit sparsely occupying the center of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College. All the white spaces separate the moments. Faces, eyes especially, greet the viewer, and, without a word uttered, people in portraiture open themselves up to judgment and understanding. It’s a bit of “#nofilter” exuberance, though the filter is Dugan herself.
The exhibit, ostensibly about confronting notions of masculinity and how they play out in the LGBT community, is the brainchild of Dugan, who has been widely praised for her technique and ability at capturing moments and souls and all of the things that make art so evocative.
“I think my process is very slow and it’s very transparent. I usually spend about an hour talking to somebody,” she says, sitting at a table in a hidden back room of the museum. “And then I spend 45 minutes to an hour making the portrait. But I also mean slow in that I’m not like, ‘snap, snap, snap.’ It’s more like, ‘OK, we’re going to set up a photo here; do this. How does it feel if you sit like this? And I’ll say, ‘OK, that’s good, that’s working. That’s not working. Let’s try something else.’ So by the time I actually press the shutter, the person totally knows what they are getting.”
That attention to detail has won Dugan, at a sprightly 29 years old, huge high-art acclaim. Following her studies at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and subsequent degrees from Harvard University and Columbia College Chicago, she has rightfully ascended into the gallery world the nation over, including permanent installations at Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, among a litany of others.
In person, Dugan carries her humility with a dagger of intellect on its side. She’s unassuming, but certainly aware of what she is doing. She exhibits her own sort of masculinity, though she says that she is not in transition, even when many of her subjects are. Her partner, Vanessa, a tall blonde drink of pixie beauty, was in town for the September opening that Watermark attended, (Watermark is sponsoring the exhibit, which runs through January with an artist’s lecture on Nov. 5) and is a frequent subject in Dugan’s work.
Perhaps more impressively, Dugan herself poses in sometimes compromised, always real, positions for her own photography. It’s as if she’s allowing her subjects to see that she, too, is willing to let her guard down, to not control the message exclusively from the artists’ gaze. She speaks openly about the abuses of photography in marginalized communities.
“I consider myself part of the trans community, but I am not fully transitioning, and so I feel at home in this more androgynous space,” she says. “I do think my work within transgender communities is definitely made easier by me having somewhat of a trans identity, although I would say that I don’t share the experience with every single person I’m photographing.”
But through most of the Every breath we drew exhibit – which boasts an accompanying photography book – it’s not so much the gender identities on display as it is the attitudes caught in moments caught on film.
“I think there’s something I find really powerful in slowing down a moment,” she says. “I think so much of our culture is so fast and so, like, immediate visual consumption. And so I think part of what makes my pictures successful is that they kind of slow down time and they distill it this more, not essential, but it becomes something more rooted. It’s not something passing.”
Dugan and CFAM were kind enough to share the following images with Watermark, presented here with statements from our interview with Dugan.
“One of the main things that I want to communicate is that I think that loosening our expectations around gender and sexuality, that doesn’t just affect trans people and LGBT [people]. It affects everybody.”
Nino, 2012
“I think it starts with who I’m interested in photographing, actually. I should say, in previous bodies of work, for example, I said, you know. I’m photographing trans men. So it was sort of obvious whether you fit or not. And with this body of work I was much more interested in, or I was mostly drawn to people who really embodied this assuredness in themselves, especially when their identity went somewhat against the status quo. So it was this combination of strength and vulnerability that I was really drawn to.”
Colby, 2012
“I very intentionally put people in intimate spaces with my subjects. We’re in their bedroom, we’re in the kitchen, we’re in this moment with them. And obviously that is something that I facilitate as the photographer, but then by extension, I want to place my viewer in that position. So I want people to sit down and think, wow, I’m in this very intimate moment with this person that I may or may not have come into contact with otherwise.”
Emmett, 2013
“I think I’m less interested in does somebody have to be feminine? Does somebody have to be masculine? And I’m more interested in kind of loosening our death grip on what it means to be feminine or masculine, and widening parameters for gender expression and gender identity and sexuality, and making that all much more fluid.”
Laurel, 2013; Ryan and Josh, 2013
“I try to make portraits that go beyond the surface and go beyond that moment. So what I was always looking for is that moment when someone kind of let their guard down and really was present with me emotionally and and my reason for loving that so much is I think it really allows you to engage with that person on a deeper level. Like you’re saying, it’s not, oh, look at this person doing this thing. It’s more psychological and it’s more about their internal identity. And then also how that matches the external, obviously, is part of it, because it’s visual medium.”
Tariq, 2012
“My mentor in grad school was [photographer Dawoud Bey. He works a lot with African-American communities. It’s something we’ve talked a lot about. When you’re photographing within a community that’s marginalized, you have this added baggage and responsibility, and people place more pressure on you in a way. Like your pictures of the trans community suddenly have to speak for trans identity. Whereas pictures of straight people don’t. No one assumes they speak for all straight people; they accept them as individuals… I think that’s something I’ve had to negotiate. I’m aware that you can’t just pretend like you don’t have that responsibility, but you also don’t want to. I don’t want to make work that’s constantly like, like either, definitely not exploitive, but I also don’t want to sugarcoat things. I want to make work that’s very real and there’s a variety of experiences within the LGBT community.”
Esvan, 2013
“I seek out people to photograph who I think are beautiful in some way. And find something in them that I relate to or that I admire. But it is very much real people. It’s not, you know. There’s no character. There’s no makeup. There’s no any of that. I actually believe pretty strongly in kind of the, what’s the phrase, like the profundity of the every day. Finding something profound in these very basic moments and the deeply human experience of living is profound on its own. You know, we don’t need to amplify it with special effects.”
Alex, 2012
“The eye contact has always been really important to me, because I think it facilitates that connection… but I also think, on another level there’s been so much, kind of, abuse of power in photography. And for me, that’s a way to also let the people that I’m photographing present themselves to you. So it’s not that it totally takes away my role as the maker, but like my show is not voyeuristic. You’re not walking in and peeping into the lives of all of these people. You walk in and you are suddenly in a relationship with all of these people and you are part of it and I think that that is quite significant.”
Self-portrait (bath), 2012
“I think the self-portraits are really important, in part, because it implicates me as being in the dialogue as well and in this community – and showing that my interest in this comes out of my own identity in a lot of ways. But I also think it flips; it changes how you view some of the other portraits, too. I think, especially for me, it was significant some of the portraits of men … I use the word desire a lot, but [that they] have more of an element of desire. I think I kind of like the viewer on some level thinking of me behind the camera. I think it kind of plays with certain expectations or certain thoughts about how these moments would take place.”
More Info:
WHAT: Every breath we drew
WHEN: Through January 3, 2016
Artist Lecture: Thursday, November 5
WHERE: Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Winter Park, Fla.
COST: Free
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