At 18, Majd was part of a crew of skaters and graffiti artists in his neighbourhood, Astoria, in Queens, New York, who knew this Icarus Complex \u2013 flying too close to the sun \u2013 all too well. \u201cWe lived a very dangerous lifestyle. We were quite literally playing with fire all the time. I mean that\u2019s how our lives were,\u201d he tells me, \u201con the edge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Astoria\u2019s diversity also shaped Majd\u2019s symbolic vocabulary. \u201cI learned very early about Greek myths and Orthodox Greek religious iconography.\u201d Alongside that, Islamic iconography, experienced through African mosques in Harlem, informed his understanding of faith. \u201cSo I frame the work like an odyssey,\u201d he explains. \u201cTen years. This hero\u2019s journey. Masculine rites of passage.\u201d<\/p>\n
At 18, Majd also discovered Nan Goldin<\/a>\u2019s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which had a huge impact on him (he would later go on to shoot his first editorial cover for Dazed <\/a>magazine in collaboration with Goldin, who interviewed Mahmoud Khalil). Goldin, who also takes cues from the Greek tragic tradition in her work, spent years shooting her friends in vulnerable environments. \u201cI discovered the book in a bookstore, and I didn\u2019t even understand the content of the work,\u201d Majd tells me. \u201cI just saw someone love their friends so much, and I saw that loving your friends can be art.\u201d<\/p>\n But his photographic journey started much earlier, at seven, when his mother gifted him his first point-and-shoot. With both parents working full-time, Majd and his brother were left to their own devices, \u201cand we were sneaking into bars and clubs and parties and getting crazy on the street. I was super quiet, so I used the camera to connect with people. I would bring these rolls of film back to my mum to develop,\u201d he continues. \u201cShe would get mad at me because we didn\u2019t have much money.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n After a while, away from the skate scene, earning money for his family, Majd reconnected with a childhood friend named James in 2016. He took James\u2019s picture at a local Astoria skatepark \u2013 a week later, he passed away. \u201cAnd I was thrust back into the world that I had left,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy friends and I trauma-bonded over the grief of losing James. I went from casually taking about 100 rolls of film a year or less, to 300 or more rolls of film a year.\u201d As a self-taught photographer, trial and error were crucial. \u201cAt the end of 2016, I told my friends I wanted to take pictures of everything: the good, the bad, the highs, the lows. And people encouraged it. This record of truth needed to be truer than true. It needed no holding back.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the ten years, Majd photographed seven \u2013 now eight \u2013 friends who have passed away. The work becomes a record against disappearance. \u201cOn a very tangible level,\u201d Majd says, \u201cthe images really speak about one person: Suba.\u201d He photographed him leading up to his accidental overdose, beaming in the rain, skin bare, in broad daylight. \u201cThe happiest photo I\u2019ve ever taken is of Suba,\u201d Dean says. \u201cIt\u2019s the one that makes me remember him how he should be remembered.\u201d<\/p>\n The image of Suba feeds into what Majd labels \u2018anti-voyeurism\u2019. \u201cI had seen so many photographers in New York perform a version of New York culture that he felt was inauthentic. \u201cThey were glamourising things I would never glamourise, such as drugs and alcohol, which are rarely explicitly shown in my work but they\u2019re deeply implicit.\u201d Images such as Coffee Table, or Suba\u2019s bedroom after clean-up (the place of his overdose), suggest to us the drug-induced world Hard Feelings unfolds in. Largely at night, indoors \u2013 spaces where vigilance drops.\u00a0<\/p>\n This emotional transparency manifests itself in Majd\u2019s use of mirrors; in his self-portraits and in images, such as his friend Dallas leaning over the sink, staring back at himself. Dean traces this visual language back to literature. \u201cI studied Flannery O\u2019Connor, the short story writer,\u201d he says. \u201cThe Southern Gothic style is very big on allegory, symbolism, metaphors in relation to faith and violence.\u201d Photography, for him, operates similarly. \u201cThe image of Dallas becomes a representation of self-reflection in relation to masculine pain and self-confrontation,\u201d says Majd. A \u201crepresentational truth\u201d, he calls it.<\/p>\n But the mirrors in his images are not the only reflective source. The camera is, technically, a mirror too. The image is made when the internal mirror inside the device captures the light and forms the image it sees reflected back. In this sense, Majd was also asking his friends to reflect on their own grief, their masculinity and their form when he asked if he could begin photographing them at such close proximity. \u201cThe camera spiritually filtered all our emotions into images,\u201d remarks the photographer.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hard Feelings is also populated by recurring figures who move through the work like characters in a novel. The show\u2019s poster features Freddy, flexing his arm muscles for us. Then there\u2019s CJ, who we see lying down and crying at the Boro Hotel. They appear and reappear, anchoring the story. \u201cIn small ways, CJ and Freddy are the main characters.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Third is Bobby, who we see lit up in the vibrant colours of late-night New York, \u201ca very respected New York art figure\u201d, Majd notes. And then there is Ivan, whose crying side-profile portrait has become one of the most recognisable images from the series.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>
![\"suba](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1436215.jpg\")
Dean Majd, Suba (sunshower), 2020Photography Dean Majd<\/p>\n
![\"Dean](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1434479.jpg\")
Dean Majd, cj crying at the boro hotel, 2020Photography Dean Majd<\/p>\n