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Dean Majd’s “Hard Feelings” Expands the Emotional Register of Masculinity

"I created a space of vulnerability for men who are often told they need to be invulnerable to survive—a space for my friends and me to face our own shadows."

For much of photography’s history, male portraiture preserved a degree of emotional distance, presenting men as stoic, authoritative and restrained. Dean Majd has spent the better part of a decade pursuing a more nuanced portrayal of masculinity in photographs that capture men in moments of profound vulnerability and mutual dependence, chronicling friendship, conflict and collective grief with great candor and empathy. His subjects are his peers and friends, and his images carry the immediacy of lived experience, unfolding in bedrooms, bathrooms, skateparks and other spaces where genuine moments of revelry and collapse unfold.

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Born in Queens to Palestinian immigrant parents, Majd is self-taught, and his practice has been deeply shaped by the city that continues to anchor his work. His photographs have appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ Middle East, Aperture and Dazed, and he has exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of the City of New York. Editorial commissions—from photographing Zohran Mamdani for Vogue to Kareem Rahma for the New Yorker—signal a growing recognition of his distinct visual sensibility.

Most recently, his debut solo exhibition, “Hard Feelings,” opened at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York—a stunning series of portraits of intimacy, grief, tenderness and psychic fracture among young men. Majd’s use of light and shadow recalls the dramatic chiaroscuro of Baroque painting, isolating gestures and faces with theatrical precision while also heightening the humanity of his subjects.

Prompted in part by the sudden death of a childhood friend, the series traces the lives of a tight-knit group of young men as they navigate the full emotional continuum of human existence. Majd allows tenderness, confusion and fragility to occupy the frame without restraint, expanding the emotional register available to male portraiture, particularly for men of color whose interior lives have historically been flattened or erased. If the exhibition’s photographs feel unusually intimate, it is because they are not constructed from observation alone but from proximity, trust and shared history. In this conversation, Majd reflects on the emotional stakes of that closeness and the visual language he built to contain it.

Your work resists the flattening gaze often directed at men, and men of color in particular. What visual or ethical principles guide your representation of these subjects? 

I began making this work with the goal of creating a record of truth, images that would only exist for my friends and me. I had not seen anyone who looked like us in popular media, or even social media, really. I felt like we were outcasts in a way. We built our own world, this special world that no one else had access to. We were everything, so I felt the need to document it in the most authentic manner. Just for us and nobody else. I respect my subjects, and the images were borne out of love. The only way they can be made is if there is trust between us.

I........

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