Due to the current pandemic, 2020 marked the first year – since the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 – without the Chicago Pride parade. As a safely-distanced digital commemoration series, WE SEE* YOU, sought out to honor the history of the 51st year of Pride celebrations, highlight LGBTQ+ individuality to create positive awareness for continuous progression, celebrate and support the love and diversity of Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community, and be a positive affirmation for all LGBTQ+ people.
Process
Influenced by the impact of LGBTQ+ visibility, Daniel Eggert and I created and executed WE SEE* YOU, as a week-long photographic and testimonial series. In honor of the 51st Pride anniversary, we collectively highlighted 51 LGBTQ+ participants outside their individual neighborhoods across Chicago and voiced what pride means to them in an informative poster-style format.
Launched through Instagram, WE SEE* YOU was published daily from June 26th-June 31st, 2020. Each participant was scheduled and safely photographed across a 3 week period and was asked a series of questions in an effort to capture each participants individuality.
Questions: What is your name, What are your pronouns, What is your sexual orientation/what letter(s) do you represent, What neighborhood do you reside in and What does Pride mean to you?
Role: Art Direction, Design
GLAAD FEATURE
To our excitement, GLAAD featured WE SEE* YOU on their social pages and wrote a feature on their blog.
We see you and you are beautiful.
*The fight for equality and social justice for the LGBTQ+ community still continues on today. With VISIBILITY and it’s IMPACT at the fundamental core, WE SEE* YOU serves as a platform to shine light and cultivate LGBTQ+ awareness by sharing individual stories and showing the breadth of diversity within the Chicago LGBTQ+ community–whether that be diversity in race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, pronouns, age, neighborhoods and so on.
WE SEE* YOU stands as an ongoing project, as we understand we have only scratched the surface for LGBTQ+ representation in Chicago. We want to meet more of you and continuously add to the WE SEE* YOU project in order to fulfill and motivate the continuous visibility of Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community.