From Hercules to Jane Eyre, countless literary heroes illustrate the significance of turning 18. On the cusp of adulthood, like a cliff’s edge, you could either take flight or fall. This significance is true for Dean Majd, too. 18 not only marks the age at which he began photographing the images that would eventually become his series Hard Feelings – his debut solo show at Baxter Street at Camera Club of New York – but also the amount of time he will have been working on the series at its culmination. 

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 – flying too close to the sun – all too well. “We lived a very dangerous lifestyle. We were quite literally playing with fire all the time. I mean that’s how our lives were,” he tells me, “on the edge.”

Astoria’s diversity also shaped Majd’s symbolic vocabulary. “I learned very early about Greek myths and Orthodox Greek religious iconography.” Alongside that, Islamic iconography, experienced through African mosques in Harlem, informed his understanding of faith. “So I frame the work like an odyssey,” he explains. “Ten years. This hero’s journey. Masculine rites of passage.”

At 18, Majd also discovered Nan Goldin’s 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 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. “I discovered the book in a bookstore, and I didn’t even understand the content of the work,” Majd tells me. “I just saw someone love their friends so much, and I saw that loving your friends can be art.”

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, “and 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,” he continues. “She would get mad at me because we didn’t have much money.” 

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’s picture at a local Astoria skatepark – a week later, he passed away. “And I was thrust back into the world that I had left,” he says. 

“My 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.” As a self-taught photographer, trial and error were crucial. “At 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.”

Over the ten years, Majd photographed seven – now eight – friends who have passed away. The work becomes a record against disappearance. “On a very tangible level,” Majd says, “the images really speak about one person: Suba.” He photographed him leading up to his accidental overdose, beaming in the rain, skin bare, in broad daylight. “The happiest photo I’ve ever taken is of Suba,” Dean says. “It’s the one that makes me remember him how he should be remembered.”

The image of Suba feeds into what Majd labels ‘anti-voyeurism’. “I had seen so many photographers in New York perform a version of New York culture that he felt was inauthentic. “They were glamourising things I would never glamourise, such as drugs and alcohol, which are rarely explicitly shown in my work but they’re deeply implicit.” Images such as Coffee Table, or Suba’s bedroom after clean-up (the place of his overdose), suggest to us the drug-induced world Hard Feelings unfolds in. Largely at night, indoors – spaces where vigilance drops. 

This emotional transparency manifests itself in Majd’s 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. “I studied Flannery O’Connor, the short story writer,” he says. “The Southern Gothic style is very big on allegory, symbolism, metaphors in relation to faith and violence.” Photography, for him, operates similarly. “The image of Dallas becomes a representation of self-reflection in relation to masculine pain and self-confrontation,” says Majd. A “representational truth”, he calls it.

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. “The camera spiritually filtered all our emotions into images,” remarks the photographer. 

Hard Feelings is also populated by recurring figures who move through the work like characters in a novel. The show’s poster features Freddy, flexing his arm muscles for us. Then there’s CJ, who we see lying down and crying at the Boro Hotel. They appear and reappear, anchoring the story. “In small ways, CJ and Freddy are the main characters.” 

Third is Bobby, who we see lit up in the vibrant colours of late-night New York, “a very respected New York art figure”, Majd notes. And then there is Ivan, whose crying side-profile portrait has become one of the most recognisable images from the series. 

“A lot of people are attracted to Ivan’s story,” Majd says, “because he’s this very masculine, strong-looking person.” Ivan is a dark-skinned, broad-shouldered Indigenous Latin American – a body which carries expectations. “He appears to people as the opposite of what a man would look like who expresses such deep emotion and such a range of emotion.” What resonates with viewers, Majd thinks, is not the tears themselves, but his “fearless vulnerability.” 

The image does not isolate Ivan’s pain but situates it within a collective moment. “It was not just that we lost one of our closest friends, Suba, to whom the show is dedicated,” Majd explains. “It was also the downtown art scene – graffiti, skating – but overall, so many people were dying of overdoses. There was just a thick grief in the air.” 

When I first met Majd in the Autumn of 2024, I told him I was surprised by how ‘American’ the work felt. “The idea of Americana and American masculinity is rooted in my work,” he tells me now, recalling our previous conversation. There is an expectation placed on him, as a Palestinian-American artist, to make work which reflects perhaps only that identity, which he tenderly resists. “The foundation of my practice is empathy and understanding someone and being there with someone,” he says. What being Palestinian has taught him is how to survive grief, something that clearly echoes through Hard Feelings. 

Masculinity, in this context, is not an abstract social role but a survival strategy. “Predominantly, men of colour are told to be invincible,” he says. “That’s survival. Especially when you have parents who are immigrants.” Invincibility becomes armour. “These shields are created. And we repress emotions to survive.”

In Astoria, the Hell Gate Bridge becomes a rite of passage where faith and masculinity converge, depicted in the final image in the exhibition, Geri on the Hellgate Bridge. “You have to choose to walk through the gate of hell to prove your masculinity. I didn’t have to leave Queens to find allegory,” Majd explains. “It was entrenched in the world around me and my friends.”

By the end of the exhibition, he hopes the end of the odyssey, “the end of these trials”, offers hope and healing rather than redemption “for anyone willing to engage in this work, engage with their hard feelings”.

Not only is Majd presenting his debut solo show this year, but this summer he will be included in MoMA PS1’s exhibition of New York photographers and artists. And, after 18 years since the first photograph, Hard Feelings will be published as a book with Aperture in 2027. “In 2028,” Majd says, laughing, “I cannot wait to fuck off, go to the beach and do nothing.” 

Hard Feelings by Dean Majd runs from 4 February to 2 April 2026 at Baxter Street, Camera Club of New York.