A Palestinian-American Photographer’s Intimate Gaze
Dean Majd captured images of his inner circle for a decade, deconstructing performances of masculinity in the process.
Every image is an entire universe in Hard Feelings, photographer Dean Majd’s solo debut at the Camera Club of New York’s BAXTER ST. The exhibition charts a 10-year journey since the passing of the artist’s childhood friend, James, whose community of skateboarders and graffiti writers is at the center of the show. Through Majd’s lens, life and death are not opposites, but a continuum wherein the most painful shadows are softened by glimmers of light.
In the aftermath of James’s death, Majd grew close to his circle of young men in Queens. The show captures a decade of communal joys and rites of passage in the skateboarding and graffiti scenes, while also confronting the dangers of their nocturnal lifestyle. Cop lights loom in “wiza bombing” (2021), while a post-party still life in “coffee table at 21-41” (2017) alludes to substance abuse.
Majd also explores the pressure to perform masculinity and the toll it takes. In “break bad (freddy flexing)” (2021), a slim man’s attempt to exert physical strength instead displays his fragility. A gentleness in his eyes suggests truer strength beneath the performance. In “ivan crying in my bedroom” (2021), a more conventionally masculine man weeps an ugly cry. The work is paired with “rissa (battered)” (2021), the show’s only portrait of a woman. Staring directly into the camera with a black eye, Rissa’s gaze indicts a culture of cyclical violence against women, compounded when men repress their emotions.
While many of these works focus on interiority, the personal is political; Majd’s experience as a Palestinian American is subtly embedded throughout the show. In “dallas (phoenix ash)” (2021), an Egyptian man enveloped in yellow-orange light looks at his double in the mirror. A private, contemplative moment becomes a surrealist portrait reflective of broader systems, including the impact of state violence on Arab communities and the internalization of that violence by men in particular. This image, like Rissa’s portrait, asks us to confront our complicity in such systems of harm.
What makes the photographs in Hard Feelings so affecting is how they were produced. Only through trust built and tested over time could Majd have captured such tender moments of those he now calls family. Many of his friends came to the opening in February, gifting him armfuls of flowers. Those bouquets became an impromptu installation placed below the show’s final image, a portrait of Suba, Majd’s close friend who passed from an accidental overdose in 2020, and to whom this show is dedicated. The flowers were wilting when I visited in late March, but no less beautiful. Above them, Suba radiates the most infectious smile. Even in death, he’s alive.
Hard Feelings continues at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York (154 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through April 8. The exhibition was curated by Marley Trigg Stewart.
