My name is Jess T. Dugan.
I'm a photographer who works primarily with portraiture, and often, within LGBTQ communities.
I'm here at the Frost Art Museum because my exhibition, To Survive On This Shore, photographs
and interviews with transgender and gender nonconforming older adults is on display in
Miami.
In this exhibition, one of my missions is to educate about issues faced by transgender
older adults.
Jess is more than on the rise.
She's really quite established now as a photographer, who has very much a humanitarian view of different
communities.
I feel that photography is a very powerful storytelling vehicle, and so I often have
my subjects look right at the camera, because I really want the viewer to be engaged in
a moment and a relationship with them, and to be met by their gaze, and have to think
about how they feel being in that situation.
I want them to reflect on their own assumptions about the person that they're looking at,
and for the act of viewing the photograph to be a really energized, engaged one, rather
than a passive one.
I want them to be in a moment with them, and look them right in their eyes, and feel this
very human connection that I think makes it very difficult to discriminate against someone
or to be hateful towards someone.
If you've really come that close to understanding who they are.
I made this project in collaboration with my partner, Vanessa Fabbre, who's a social
worker, and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis and her research focuses
on the intersection of LGBTQ communities and aging, so when we met, we realized we had
overlapping interests from working within the trans communities, and we decided to create
this project that had both the portrait and the interview narrative from each person.
And it is funny, because you know, there's always this conversation in museums about
how much text do you want in your text?
You should be looking at the work, but I think in this exhibition, the stories, they enhance
the work of art, they are a necessary component.
The portraits immediately capture people's attention, but the, the stories allow us to
talk about some of the other issues, some of the things like housing discrimination,
or employment discrimination or fear that people have about growing older as a transgender
person, or conversely, joys that they experience or triumphs of their life.
One of the subjects in the exhibition, Justin Vivian, identifies as nonbinary, and she spoke
about her decision to take estrogen being motivated, in part, by wanting to have a medical
record of her transness, because she was worried, if she grew older and lost her ability to
advocate for herself, that she would end up being treated as a man.
I met Susie and Cheryl a few years ago, and it's been really great to get to know them
because there's such love between them, and there's such a groundedness and commitment
that I think is amazing.
All we do is go out in public and just be public, you know, don't hide, 'cause we're
proud of who we are.
We love each other, we're not interfering with anybody's lives, we just wanna live our
life the best we know how, and to show everybody that it's okay.
Having their story and you know, reading about how they were together before Susie transitioned,
and their marriage has morphed and changed but they're more committed and in love than
ever before is really beautiful and really exciting, and I think it gives a lot of hope
to people who may be struggling with that question.
I think there is this focus on youth, and there's not a lot of representations of transgender
older adults, and so, they wanted to share their stories, and provide a kind of roadmap
for what a life could look like for younger trans folks, who, in most cases, have never
seen an older transgender person, and they've never seen an image of what it might look
like to grow older, and so, I was incredibly moved to the extent to which people wanted
to help others, by sharing their own story.