"The Outwin 2016" Finalist: Jess T. Dugan

Out of over 2,500 entries in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, 43 artists have their work shown in the exhibition “The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today.” Read more about one of the finalists, Jess T. Dugan.

What about the sitter inspired you?  How did the sitter inspire this specific portrait?  What made you decide to depict this sitter as you did?

Well, since my photograph is a self-portrait, I wouldn't quite say I was inspired by the sitter in a traditional sense. Self-portraits have always been a significant part of my practice, though I didn't fully realize that until more recently.  Over the past ten years, I have photographed myself as a way to understand who I am in relation to the world around me. This particular photograph is a part of my series Every breath we drew, which I began in 2011 after relocating from Boston to Chicago. My previous work had focused on issues of gender and sexuality, specifically within the female-to-male transgender community, and I was thinking a lot about the idea of masculinity on both a personal and cultural level. The more time I spent thinking about it, the more elusive and malleable it seemed. I also found myself alone in a new city, figuring out where I fit in and with whom I felt connected. Using the investigation of masculinity as a starting point, my photographs became about the intersection of a personal identity and a need for intimacy and connection with others.

Unlike previous projects of mine, the subjects are not united by one particular identity, but instead are united by my attraction to them- and not a romantic attraction, particularly, but a more complicated attraction of recognizing something in them that I also perceive or desire in myself. 

In the beginning of the series, my self-portraits were infused with a sense of longing, or searching- but this image, made slightly later, is much more confident and infused with an ownership of my own sexuality.  It strikes a different tone.  I love how this photo plays with assumptions around gender and sexuality while also asserting who I am, as both a person and as a photographer, to the viewer.

In many ways, I think of Every breath we drew as one big self-portrait, reflecting back my own sexuality and identity through the people I have photographed. In these pictures, I was searching for a kind of intimacy, a closeness, with the people I photographed, and the images became less about representing someone’s identity objectively and more about representing who they were to me in that moment.  I was investigating aspects of my own sexuality, allowing myself to photograph masculinity through a lens of desire, and also allowing myself to be gazed upon in a more direct way.  On an intellectual level, I was trying to question the rigid expectations surrounding gender- and masculinity specifically- but on a subjective level, I was trying to figure out who I was in relation to other people and who I could connect with in a meaningful and profound way.

How did your work develop from idea to execution?

This particular photo has an interesting story because it is one of the only re-shoots I have ever done.  The idea originally came to me for this pose while making self-portraits alone in my apartment in Chicago.  The pose references an iconic, sexualized version of masculinity, often seen on dating sites, in clothing advertisements, and the like.

It is a strong pose, displaying both a willingness to be vulnerable and also an embodiment of sexuality. When I first made the photo, I loved the pose, but the environment was all wrong; the lighting was off, and the location I had chosen was distracting. Using the original photo as a guide, I recreated the pose in a different location with better lighting, creating the image as it is today. 

In general, my work follows a cyclical process.  I work rather intuitively, making portraits that I am compelled to make and examining them more intellectually during the editing process. My work is always informed by my own experiences and my own life.  I relate to others most intimately through my photography, and my work is always a reflection of whatever my concerns are at that time.

What relationship do the materials have to the meaning?

I use medium and large format cameras to make my photographs, a process that requires me to be slow, deliberate, and communicative.  My camera is always on a tripod and my shutter speeds are relatively slow, which means that my sitter has to fully participate in the making of the portrait.  I derive a lot of inspiration from portrait paintings, specifically in regard to color and light, and I often spend a lot of time working with my sitter and finding the right pose, location, and lighting for my photographs.  Through this process, I am able to make portraits that transcend a particular time and place while simultaneously being a very real reflection of the person in front of the camera.  I aim to make portraits that are psychologically engaged and emotionally nuanced, and my process allows me the time and ability to do that. 

How does the piece fit within your larger body of work?

My work, as a whole, engages with issues of identity, gender, sexuality, and community. For the past decade, I have made photographs that examine the various ways in which individual identities intersect with our social, cultural, and political world. 

In addition to continuing to photograph for Every breath we drew, I am also working on two new projects.  The first focuses on myself and my partner, Vanessa, and our relationship.  I began this project in 2012 when we met, and in some ways, I think being in a new relationship changed my relationship to Every breath we drew, which was so much about this desire for intimacy- and almost came out of a sense of loneliness or searching.  And then suddenly I was in a romantic relationship, living a different, much more sustained and complicated, kind of intimacy.  We have been making pictures together for a three years and it has been interesting to see how they have changed quite dramatically even in a short amount of time. 

The second project, To Survive on this Shore, combines photographs of transgender and gender-variant people over the age of fifty with interviews about their life experiences in regards to gender, identity, age, and sexuality and provides an intimate view into the complexities of aging as a transgender person. For this series, I am traveling throughout the country in search of a diverse group of individuals.  I have completed 42 portraits and interviews to date and am working towards a total of 75 for a book and exhibition. 

You can see Dugan’s work in “The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today,” up now through Jan. 8, 2017. Also, be sure to vote in our People’s Choice Competition.