Join us in-person for an author reading, conversation, and book-signing in honor of Look at me like you love me by Jess T. Dugan. Dugan will be in conversation with Kelli Connell.

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Please note: all in-person events held at Women & Children First require masks and proof of vaccination.

Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. The event will begin at 7 p.m.

‘The romantic ephemerality suggested in these sensually plainspoken images situates them in a grand painterly and poetic tradition … [Dugan’s] frank and fluid approach to representing queer affection makes space for a more complex and beautiful human experience, at odds with the erasures and reductions of our banal binaristic culture.’ Artforum

‘There is so much I can’t say in my photographs, though it’s all there, just below 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 our identities are shaped by these experiences. In this highly personal collection of work, Dugan brings together self-portraits, portraits of individuals and couples, and still lifes, interwoven with diaristic 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 to connect with others on a deeper level. Their process of working slowly and collaboratively discloses moments of heightened psychological intensity in images that transcend the specifics of a particular person or place, engaging with what it means to know oneself alongside and through others.

Using medium-format cameras and natural lighting, Dugan employs traditional photographic practices to depict these contemporary subjects, resulting in images that both evoke and reimagine the conventional dynamics of art-historical portraiture. Brought together here, these photographs function as an extended, oblique self-portrait as much as a catalogue of friends and loved ones. Through a diffuse but studied sequence of image and text, Look at me like you love me brings our attention to one of the most powerful and complex forms of intimacy – that of seeing and being seen.

Jess T. Dugan is an artist whose work explores issues of identity through photographic portraiture. Their work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of over 40 museums throughout the United States. Their monographs include Look at me like you love me (MACK, 2022), To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) and Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015). They are the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an ICP Infinity Award, and were selected by the Obama White House as an LGBT Artist Champion of Change.

Kelli Connell is an artist whose work investigates sexuality, gender, identity and photographer / sitter relationships. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J Paul Getty Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. Publications of her work include PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice (Aperture), Photo Art: The New World of Photography (Aperture), and the monograph Kelli Connell: Double Life (DECODE Books). Connell has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, PLAYA, Peaked Hill Trust, LATITUDE, Light Work, and The Center for Creative Photography. Connell lives in Chicago where she is an editor at SKYLARK Editions and teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

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Tags: Chicago, Edgewater, Jess T. Dugan, Kelli Connell, LOOK AT ME LIKE YOU LOVE ME, Women & Children First Bookstore