First look: Jesse Glazzard distills the dirt and beauty of queer life

This article is taken from the autumn 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally from September 10:

“My images are dirty,” says Jesse Glazzard, “but I think dirt is beautiful.” Born and raised in Halifax, West Yorkshire, Glazzard has spent the last decade photographing the people around him. Now, that archive has been brought together in his first monograph, The Sound of Dirt and Beauty, published by MACK.

Glazzard never set out to make a photobook. When asked where it all began, he replies, “I think I never thought of it as a project until I was asked if I had enough photos for a book.” It was only then, when looking back through his archive, he realised what he had documented: “I’ve shot like ten years of people just changing, growing, partying – everything.”

Most of the people pictured are friends, lovers, or part of Glazzard’s wider circle, some still in his life and others not. They’re photographed piled on top of each other in festival tents, wrestling in a paint-filled paddling pool or caught up in the mess of everyday life. In one of his favourite images, a messy sink basin is strewn with familiar objects, including a used T-shot syringe. “It’s so mundane,” he says. “I like that you don’t know if it’s heroin or hormones.”

There’s a viscerality that runs through Glazzard’s work, not just in what he captures but in the way the images feel. Even stripped back into black and white, the grit comes through in the grain and contrast. “I’m naturally drawn to the physical in my personal work,” he says. “Working only with different types of print allows me to be present with the work in a very tactile way. The texture makes me feel closer to the image.”

That sense of feeling extends into the title, too. “I was thinking about the different senses that photography can set off for me,” Glazzard says, explaining its origin. “Sometimes when the energy is in the photo I can hear it like a sound.” He was also thinking about his own aesthetic, “how it’s chaotic and dirty.”

The photographer spent most of his childhood in Halifax, moving around Yorkshire with his brother and dad before spending his teens in Normanton. “Most of the places I grew up was proper chavy and kinda rough, kinda beautiful, kinda chaotic,” he says. “You didn’t really have to go far for nature or a fight.” That upbringing has stayed with him, even if his relationship to it has changed. “Growing up in such a dirty house, I had to reframe it in my brain to make it beautiful.”

The portraits within the book are broken up by handwritten lists, scrawled across crumpled pages of lined paper. One titled Posh Things includes Marks & Spencer and making a book; another, Things that remind me off home, includes Kate Bush, brown sauce and dirty floorboards.

Glazzard points to influences that range from bell hooks, old zines, Tish Murtha, Nan Goldin and Jim Goldberg to “everyday life”. As a student, he spent time in libraries looking for traces of trans and working-class lives in Britain. “People like me haven’t always been visible,” he says. “I’m interested in how I can contribute to that history without making the work fit into one identity. I’m interested in creating images that allow people to exist with a bit more complexity, intimacy and ambiguity.”

The project is now being shown as an exhibition at London’s ICA, where Glazzard has been experimenting with print sizing and large-scale screen printing. He’s interested in how the images work together when they’re seen physically. “I’m excited to see them speaking to each other.”

When he took the photographs, Glazzard never imagined they would eventually be shown at this scale. “I was just making from impulse,” he says. But seeing the work physically has always mattered to him. “I wasn’t interested in the work really existing just in the online void,” he says. “I always felt that people experiencing them physically was important.”

The Sound of Dirt and Beauty (SPBH Editions, 2026) by Jesse Glazzard is published by MACK.