UPCOMING EXHIBITION

Hard Feelings

Dean Majd

BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York is proud to present Hard Feelings, the debut solo exhibition by Palestinian-American lens-based artist Dean Majd. Curated by Marley Trigg Stewart, BAXTER ST’s 2025-26 Guest Curatorial Recipient, the show will be on view February 4 to April 2, 2026.

Prompted by a childhood friend’s sudden passing just a week after their reunion, Majd began documenting the male dynamics within his circle – an insular graffiti crew in his hometown of Queens, New York. Made largely at night and with point-and-shoot cameras, the photographs oscillate between moments of revelry and violence, creating a nuanced portrayal of masculinity, the cyclical nature of trauma, and the power of empathy.

Hard Feelings brings together works that offer an unflinching testament to lives deemed invisible yet demand to be seen. Majd’s comprehensive archive of the group’s rituals, its frictions and intimacies, began innocently as a record of truth; his lens offered a channel for their collective grief, the impetus to deepen his burgeoning relationship with the camera. 

Moving between documentarian and participant, Majd complicates conventional ideas of distance, authorship, and complicity. Over time the boundaries between himself, his friends, and his camera dissolved. The tension in the images is palpable, dominated by the emotional awareness that we as viewers have become privy to things Majd cannot unsee. Wounds cut deep, psychic or otherwise, but Majd’s photographs also remind us that scars are signs of healing.

Invoking the spirituality and tenebrism of Baroque painting through deep shadows and sudden illumination, as well as a lineage of photographers favoring diaristic intimacy over traditional documentary distance, Majd has cultivated a visual language that is both formally rigorous and emotionally bare. Without romanticizing their experiences, the interplay of chroma and contrast form love letters to his collaborators, to Queens and to New York City itself. 

Photographed across the years before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Majd mythologizes the stories of lives ravaged by the ever changing nature of New York City. His lens immortalizes the passing of friends, the chasing of ghosts, nocturnal quests for ego death, and masculine rites of passage – trials often faced by the men of color in Majd’s life, crafting a legacy for those often unseen and unconsidered. Through trust, his friends – themselves part of a lost generation – bore their cuts and tears to him as affirmations of their existences.

In Hard Feelings, wounds and bruises become tender offerings. The boundary between violence and vulnerability dissipates, with Majd’s camera insisting on presence – on seeing fully. The photographs become an acknowledgment of pain and spiritual catharsis. His empathetic eye transforms his lens into a mirror that reflects his sitters’ darkest internal conflicts, and a space for them to face their own shadows; a place to express repressed emotions; a moment of vulnerability for those taught they must be invulnerable to survive. This odyssey resolves as an invitation for hope and healing for all those willing to engage with their hard feelings.

Hard Feelings is presented in dedication to the memory of Subash “Suba” Tamang.

About Dean Majd

Dean Majd (b. 1990) is a self-taught, lens-based artist born and based in Queens, New York. Born to Palestinian immigrants, he studied international relations with a focus on the Middle East at CUNY The City College of New York, CUNY. Majd began forming his intimate and cinematic visual language after being given his first camera at seven years old by his mother. His diaristic work engages with violence as an imposed center-point of one’s life, focusing on repressed, negative emotions within contemporary masculinity in relation to addiction and self-destruction. His work also explores the complexities of the Arab-American dichotomy and the Palestinian diaspora against apartheid, and how they overlap.

Majd has been profiled by Aperture, MATTE Magazine, AnOther Magazine, and GQ Middle East. His editorial work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, and New York Magazine among others. His work has mostly recently been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in the exhibition New York Now: Home, as well as lectured at the International Center of Photography. In fall 2025 he will be an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and he is one of the recipients of the 2025 En Foco Fellowship Award. He is passionate about cinema, immensely devoted to his friends (his chosen family), and a proud New Yorker. He believes that love, above all else, is the driving force behind everything he does.

About Marley Trigg Stewart

Marley Trigg Stewart (b. Oakland, CA) is an artist whose practice explores authorship and absence through personal histories. Trigg Stewart’s work has been featured in MATTE Magazine and Musee Magazine, and his writing has been featured in Aperture. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at Pratt Institute, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.