Jesse Glazzard’s messy portrait of queer friends, lovers and chosen family

Making a book is a complicated affair for Jesse Glazzard. 

Up until this point, the 32-year-old British photographer has existed in the world of self-published zines, fashioning visual records of his queer and trans circles: drag queens hoisting flamingo-candled cakes, performers encrusted in drying mud, lovers kissing against cherry-toned fabrics. Makeshift, inexpensive, and securely enclosed, Glazzard’s risograph tributes have largely passed through the hands of his friends and community, immune to commercial pressures. 

“With a zine, it’s a tenner, you know. I don’t want it to feel like I’m selling something. It just has its own life,” he says.

Enter The Sound of Dirt and Beauty, Glazzard’s debut monograph. It’s a warm-blooded and spiky invitation into his most intimate moments and his queer and working-class community: needles congested with testosterone, scabs and scars, taut binders, limbs reaching and grappling for tender embraces.

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“The goal was to make a book, but actually getting there – my God, I didn’t actually think it would happen. So there’s that feeling, and then there’s also wanting to protect the people in the imagery because the work is so personal,” says Glazzard.

A West Yorkshire native, Glazzard readily recognises his ​“underclassness”, describing his home environment as ​“grim bleakness”. This foundational element now informs his photography – grainy, murky, and largely black-and-white. ​“I’d rather shoot the mess than the clean area, because I grew up in such a messy, grimy house.” 

Since the unintentional inception of this project 10 years ago, Glazzard has progressively traversed into larger cities, from Halifax to Manchester to London. During his second year of university in Manchester, a fixation on documentation emerged as he began capturing his immediate surroundings with diaristic fervour – close friends, lovers, his chosen family. ​“I sometimes get nervous about it – what if my friends think I’m just obsessed with them?” he half-jokes.

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In the rare instance that Glazzard finds himself without his camera, he takes to notebooks instead, encapsulating the moment in any way he can. Punctuating the hazy, lived-in images throughout the book are photocopied images of his handwritten lists, clearly defined and contrasting, resetting the flow of pages.

One list begins with ​‘Things that remind me off home’. Among cig butts, a mouldy washing machine and dirty floorboards, he also writes of warm bed, hot bath and Kate Bush – a favourite of Glazzard’s late mum. ​“She would go around the house naked, singing Kate Bush,” he says. ​“I had one thing of my mum’s and it’s gone. I can’t have her in the work, and that’s heartbreaking. So to have her in the list is really nice.”

If photography is the ultimate act of preservation, Glazzard has no intention of letting a moment slip past him. In his exploration of archival materials, Glazzard has struggled to find reflections of his history: the British trans experience. Since beginning this project, he’s seen mounting anger and depression throughout the queer community. At the same time, he’s noticed a new craving for visibility from his peers. As he considers whether grief can keep someone alive, his living archive memorialises those closest to him, joy and loss intermingling as he holds on to those who have already parted from his life and those who remain close.

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Over the past decade, Glazzard has witnessed and captured the growth of his dearest friends, like Ella, blue-toned and youthful in one image, pregnant-bellied and held by her partner in another, the two standing with eyes turned softly downward. In another image, Glazzard’s best friend Ames reclines against a hospital bed. Pre-surgery, they steal a glance over their freckled shoulder, a strip of gauze pressed to one side. Glazzard’s own transition is traced throughout the book, self-portraits narrating the passage of time in bathroom mirrors or against blank walls, his signature approach. 

“It’s so important that you photograph yourself so that you have the power over your own image,” he says. ​“Images are put online and then get eaten up. I’ll put them in print or exhibitions because I don’t want them to become a spectacle.” That instinct to protect extends over Glazzard’s self-portraiture and into the friends and lovers who populate his work. Born from lived experience, his photographs resist the polished, commercial language so often imposed on queer bodies, instead safeguarding something more real: people growing up, changing, grieving, and caring for one another. 

After a decade spent trying to hold on to the people around him, Glazzard now finds himself somewhere unexpectedly settled. There is the book he never quite believed he would make, paying the rent he never thought he’d be able to afford each month, and the steady relationships that surround him. ​“I feel the safest I have ever felt in my life,” he says. For someone so accustomed to preserving what might disappear, there is something quietly radical in having a life that, for once, feels secure.

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

Sunny Sunday is a freelance culture journalist. Follow her on Instagram.

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