Can't Tell Heroin From Hormones: Jesse Glazzard's Decade-Long Slices of Queer Life

A photo of a bathroom sink, cluttered with the most ordinary odds and ends, a used T-shot syringe mixed in among them. "It's so mundane," says Jesse Glazzard. "I love that you can't tell if it's heroin or hormones." It's his favourite image from the book, and probably the most accurate distillation of the whole thing — dirt and beauty were never opposites to begin with.

Born and raised in Halifax, West Yorkshire, Glazzard has spent the past decade photographing the people around him. That accumulated archive has now come together as his debut photobook, *The Sound of Dirt and Beauty*, published by MACK as part of the SPBH Editions series. He admits he never set out to treat it as a "project": "It wasn't until someone asked if I had enough photos for a book that I went back and looked, and realised I'd been shooting for a full ten years — people in there changing, growing, going wild — everything's in it."

The people in the photos are mostly his friends, lovers, or people from his life — some still around, some not anymore. They're piled together in festival tents, wrestling in paddling pools full of paint, or simply caught in the messiest moments of everyday life. Even converted to black and white, that rawness stays put in the frame through grain and contrast. "I've always been drawn to physical things," he says. "Printing with different types of photo paper lets me stay in the work in a really tactile way — the texture makes me feel closer to the image."

The book's title also ties back to the senses. "I was thinking about which of my senses photography could trigger," Glazzard explains. "Sometimes the energy in a photo is so strong I can practically 'hear' it." He's also describing his own aesthetic — messy, dirty. Where he grew up was mostly "a bit rough, a bit rugged, but also kind of beautiful, kind of chaotic." His childhood was spent in Halifax, before moving around a few places in Yorkshire with his brother and dad, eventually settling in Normanton as a teenager. "You didn't have to go far to find nature, and you didn't have to go far to find a fight either," he says. "Growing up in such a messy house, I had to reframe it in my head to be able to see it as beautiful."

Between the portraits in the book are handwritten lists, scrawled across creased lined paper. One, titled "Posh Things," lists Marks & Spencer and "writing a book"; another, "Things That Remind Me of Home," lists Kate Bush, brown sauce, and dirty wooden floors.

Glazzard's influences span bell hooks, old-school zines, Tish Murtha, Nan Goldin, and Jim Goldberg, alongside "everyday life" itself. During his student years, he spent a lot of time in libraries, hunting for traces left behind by trans and working-class life in Britain. "People like me haven't always been visible," he says. "What matters to me is how I can contribute to that history, without forcing the work into a single identity. The images I want to make are ones that let people exist with complexity, intimacy, and ambiguity."

The work is now also on view as a same-titled exhibition at London's ICA, where Glazzard has been experimenting with different print sizes and large-scale screen printing. "I'm excited to see them talk to each other," he says of seeing the images blown up and placed alongside one another in a physical space. When he first took these photos, he never imagined they'd be shown at this kind of scale — "I was shooting completely on instinct at the time," he says. But having the work felt physically has always mattered to him: "I'm not interested in these pieces only existing in the void of the internet — I've always felt it's important for people to experience them in a physical way."

*The Sound of Dirt and Beauty* is published by MACK; related content appears in Dazed's Autumn 2026 issue, on international sale from September 10.