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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