There is a used syringe on a messy sink basin in one of Jesse Glazzard’s favourite photographs, and the point, he says, is that you cannot tell whether it contained heroin or hormones. Jesse Glazzard’s Sound of Dirt, published as The Sound of Dirt and Beauty by MACK, arrives this autumn as his first monograph, drawn from a decade of images made among friends, lovers and the wider community around him. It is, among other things, a portrait of a life in which the domestic and the transgressive occupy the same frame without apology.
Glazzard grew up in Halifax, West Yorkshire, moving around Yorkshire with his brother and father 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, its textures and its disorder, runs through everything in the book. ‘Growing up in such a dirty house,’ he explains, ‘I had to reframe it in my brain to make it beautiful.’
Jesse Glazzard’s Sound of Dirt and the Living Archive
The book did not begin as a project. When Glazzard was asked whether he had enough photographs for a book, he went back through his archive and found that he had been documenting something without quite knowing it: ‘I’ve shot like ten years of people just changing, growing, partying, everything.’ The resulting 168-page volume, which MACK describes as reimagining the idea of the family through photography, intimacy and the living archive, collects images of people piled into festival tents, wrestling in paint-filled paddling pools, and caught in the unheroic mess of everyday life. Some of those pictured are still in his life; others are not. The emotional range is wide.
There is a viscerality in how these images feel as much as in what they show. Glazzard works with different types of print, and even in black and white the grit comes through in the grain and contrast. ‘Working only with different types of print allows me to be present with the work in a very tactile way,’ he says. ‘The texture makes me feel closer to the image.’ The title, too, is a matter of sensation rather than description. ‘Sometimes when the energy is in the photo I can hear it like a sound,’ he explains. Aesthetically, he was thinking about ‘how it’s chaotic and dirty.’
The book’s portraits are broken up by handwritten lists, scrawled across crumpled 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. The lists function like captions for a life rather than for individual images. Glazzard cites influences ranging from bell hooks and old zines to Tish Murtha, Nan Goldin and Jim Goldberg, but also ‘everyday life.’ As a student, he spent time in libraries searching for traces of trans and working-class lives in Britain. ‘People like me haven’t always been visible,’ he says. ‘I’m interested in creating images that allow people to exist with a bit more complexity, intimacy and ambiguity.’
From Impulse to the ICA
The work is now the subject of an exhibition at London’s ICA, where Glazzard has been experimenting with print sizing and large-scale screen printing, exploring how the images speak to each other when experienced physically. ‘I was just making from impulse,’ he says of the photographs’ origins, a confession that sits interestingly against the considered installation choices he is now making. He has always resisted the images living purely online. ‘I always felt that people experiencing them physically was important,’ he says. The ICA show makes that conviction architecturally legible.
The Sound of Dirt and Beauty is available from Rizzoli Bookstore at $35.00. The autumn 2026 issue of Dazed, in which Glazzard discusses the book at length, is on sale internationally from 10 September. Further detail on the book and exhibition, including MACK’s framing of its themes of family and the living archive, is available on the MACK website.
