Jess T. Dugan’s *Look at me like you love me*, published by MACK in 2022, considers how desire, intimacy, and companionship shape the identities we inhabit. Its subject is personal, but the book does not reduce intimacy to autobiography. Instead, Dugan uses photography to ask how a person comes to know themselves through relationships—with partners, family, friends, and the self encountered in solitude.

The book brings together self-portraits, portraits of individuals and couples, and still lifes, interwoven with diaristic writing on relationships, loss, healing, and the changes that define a life. These elements are arranged in a diffuse yet deliberate sequence, allowing image and text to echo one another without settling into a simple narrative. The result is an extended, oblique self-portrait: at once a record of people close to Dugan and a study of the emotional conditions that connect them.

Dugan works slowly and collaboratively, using medium-format cameras and natural light. That measured process gives the photographs a pronounced psychological intensity while preserving the presence and particularity of those pictured. Traditional photographic practices are brought to contemporary questions of identity and intimacy; familiar conventions of portraiture are not discarded, but subtly reimagined. The still lifes and writings widen the field, making the book as attentive to absence, memory, and private reflection as to the human face.

For collectors, the book’s significance lies in this sustained negotiation between portraiture and self-examination. It asks what it means not only to see another person, but to be seen by them, and how recognition can become a form of closeness. A 108-page hardcover, *Look at me like you love me* is a carefully composed collaboration between photographs and writing, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards.