When the photographs in Jesse Glazzard’s first book, The Sound of Dirt and Beauty, came back from retouching, something was wrong: they were too clean.
The British photographer, who presents the project in an exhibition at the ICA from 12 September, is used to leaving traces of the photographic process intact: flecks of dust on a handprint, dirt, imperfect colour, the evidence of a process that has misbehaved. ‘The dirt is important,’ he says. There is little interest in making things pristine here; instead, imperfection is allowed to remain part of the image, something Glazzard traces back to the environment he grew up in and, later, to the circumstances in which he learnt to make photographs.
When Wallpaper’s acting photography editor Cindy Parthonnaud and I spent time with the book ahead of our conversation with Glazzard, we were struck by the overwhelming generosity of the images. The accumulation of lives and moments that refuse to be contained, combined with a resistance to being too neatly defined or categorised feel fundamental to Glazzard’s work.
Spanning a decade, The Sound of Dirt and Beauty moves through the lives of the photographer’s friends, lovers and collaborators, as well as his own, passing between portraits and parties, bodies and bedrooms, people alone and others sitting in each other’s laps. His transition takes place in parallel to the images over the years, but doesn’t become the book’s singular narrative, rather one moving alongside many others.
There is an extraordinary intimacy to the photographs, so much so that looking through them can produce the slightly disorienting feeling of having arrived somewhere you perhaps shouldn’t be. ‘How the hell did the camera get there?’ Cindy asks, and for Glazzard the answer is trust. He points to a photograph made in bed, in which someone reaches towards his belly button; when there is an ‘instinctual’ relationship between himself and the person he is photographing, he explains, the camera stops feeling like an intervention. ‘The trust is there on both sides, the camera is just kind of there as an extension,’ he says, and often he will barely look through it.
That trust continues long after the shutter closes; many photographs didn't make it into the publication to respect the person’s wishes for it to stay private. ‘I have to put my ego to the side, even though the photo is sick,’ he says. There’s a responsibility that comes with bringing a camera into these relationships: the people in Glazzard’s photographs are not simply subjects to be documented, but participants, with a say in how they are seen. Here, intimacy is less an aesthetic choice than an exchange, and the closeness we experience in the photographs is possible because that responsibility extends beyond the image.
To describe the book simply as a portrait of community would be a lethargic reading, and an insufficient one, something Glazzard himself acknowledges when he speaks cautiously about the neatness of the term. There is a tendency, he says, when making work in and around community, for people to ‘put you in this box and that’s all you are’.
We keep returning to a certain toughness in the photographs…grit, even. Glazzard pauses over the word. ‘Probably more like rough,’ he says, ‘Rough and a bit dirty.' It is a distinction that feels important, because the roughness here is not synonymous with hardship, nor is it polished into an easy narrative of resilience; it coexists with silliness, desire, mundanity and tenderness, closer to the mess of making a life with, around and sometimes in spite of other people.
Part of what gets lost in that neat categorisation, for Glazzard, is class. Handwritten lists interrupt the photographs throughout the book, giving fragments of context to otherwise life-dense pages; one gathers things that remind him of home, Kate Bush among them. Their inclusion allows another part of Glazzard’s experience to enter the book, complicating any temptation to read either him or his subjects through a single identity.
Class is also embedded in the material history of the photographs themselves. Some of Glazzard’s early rolls were processed in his bathroom because regularly paying for a lab wasn’t an option, meaning uneven colour, dust and accidents entered the work through circumstance as much as choice. Eventually, these “imperfections” become inseparable from Glazzard’s distinct photographic language, shaped in part by making do with what was available. His longstanding attachment to the zine comes from a similar place: cheap, immediate and possible to make without waiting for funding or permission. ‘It’s just better to make your own shit and just let them find you,’ he says.
Editing ten years of photographs began, sensibly enough, by covering his entire bedroom in them, surrounding him with the edit until there was almost no escaping it. Pictures came down at night whenever something no longer felt right. Once he reached around 300, he took them to his studio at Studio Voltaire, where Bruno Ceschel, founder of SPBH, and graphic designer Brian Paul Lamotte, joined him on the kitchen floor to find connections Glazzard had become too immersed to see clearly himself.
Chronology mattered less than whether the images spoke to one another: a rose might find itself beside a hand, or photographs separated by hearts and years to suddenly share an intimacy. Glazzard describes looking for ‘how close’ an image feels ‘without the camera being involved’, an instinct that seems to run through the book as much as it guided its edit, and when he finally handed the finished project in, he cried for two days.
Eventually, a kiss made the cover.
The Sound of Dirt and Beauty is published on 15 September by SPBH Editions / Mack. Glazzard presents the project at the ICA from 12 September, opening during Glue Book fair with a talk alongside Biogal and Hannah Geddes in the Nash and Brandon Rooms
