Jess T. Dugan: I want you to know my story

Jess T. Dugan (born 1986, Biloxi, Mississippi; lives St. Louis, Missouri) creates photographic portraiture and self-portraiture with technical skill and forthright personal engagement, exploring kinship, community, and identity. Dugan embraces natural light, slow working methods, and collaboration with their subjects to create images that capture both individual personality and universal humanity. Drawing from their own experiences as a queer and nonbinary person, Dugan also works to advance the visual representation of queer people. The artist summarizes their entire creative approach this way: “For me, it’s all about energy and love.” 

At the Akron Art Museum, Jess T. Dugan: I want you to know my story will feature portraits from the artist’s series “Every Breath We Drew” (2011–2015), “Look at me like you love me” (2015–2022), and a yet unnamed series beginning in 2022. The artist considers these groups to be successive chapters in a broader, unified effort to understand and share the life-affirming power of relationships in a way that is only possible through photography. In choosing their portrait subjects, Dugan describes a search for “people who are fully and authentically themselves and who have a combination of strength and gentleness.” 

The exhibition will also include photographs from Dugan’s ongoing series “Family Pictures,” which includes self-portraiture and images of multiple generations of the artist’s immediate family. The closely related videos Letter to My Father and Letter to My Daughter feature similar imagery along with Dugan’s own deeply personal voiceovers, and this body of work is broadly candid and revealing. The artist considers these to be essential qualities, especially alongside their portraits of others. As they explain: “I think that by sharing my own truths, and by making myself vulnerable in that way, it opens up space for other people to share with me. That’s true both of people that I photograph, and those who ultimately see my work.” 

Jess T. Dugan: I want you to know my story has been organized in celebration of Dugan’s selection as winner of the Akron Art Museum’s 2024 Knight Foundation Purchase Award for Photographic Media. The Knight Award was established in 1990 through a generous gift from the Knight Foundation, allowing the Museum to recognize living artists’ achievements in photography while bringing their work into the permanent collection. Past winners include some of contemporary photography’s most accomplished artists: Zanele Muholi, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Carrie Mae Weems, and many more.