Dr. David Teplica has a black-and-white photograph on his studio wall of what looks like a humanoid creature struggling to escape a cloth web. “This is a straight young man who’s just entering the dating world and kind of scared. I took him to Hugh Hefner’s bedroom, which I consider the birthplace of the modern sexual revolution. I isolated him inside the fabric and photographed him all alone in the big empty black space.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In another photo, two writhing ghostly figures are trying to embrace. This, Teplica says, is a young Highland Park couple engaged to be married; they’re concerned about bringing their sexual histories into the relationship but afraid to be tested for HIV. With webbed fingers they reach out for each other, but the cloth that encases them is a barrier to their embrace.
“Quite soon after I shot them I found out that they broke up.”
