Brian Weil, 1979-95 - 9780884541271

This book offers the first career retrospective of Brian Weil (1954--1996), an artistwhose photographs pushed viewers into a deeply unsteadying engagement with insular communities andsubcultures. A younger contemporary of such participant-observer photographers as Larry Clark andNan Goldin, Weil took photographs that foreground the complex relationships between photographer andsubject, and between photograph and viewer.

Weil was a member of ACT UP and thefounder of New York City's first needle exchange, and his photographs became inextricably tied tohis activist practice. His late work, an extensive series of portraits whose subjects bear witnessto the emerging AIDS pandemic, is included here, along with selections from several earlier andconcurrent projects: Sex (underground sex and bondage participants), Miami Crime(homicide scenes investigated by the Miami Police Department), Hasidim(populations of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and the Catskills), and an extensive video project withmembers of nascent transgender support groups.

This book commemorates a 2013exhibition of Brian Weil's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University ofPennsylvania and includes in-depth essays on Weil by Stamatina Gregory and Jennifer Burris, aninteriew with the artist by Claudia Gould, and reprints of archival edited notes discussing crimeand photographic evidence based on a series of interviews conducted by Sylvère Lotringer withfilmmaker George Diaz in the 1980s.