Brian Weil collection

Brian Weil (1954-1996), was a photographer and activist who spent his career documenting marginalized communities, using photography as an excuse to become deeply immersed in the lives of others. Weil was born in Chicago and began photographing as a teenager where he attended Columbia College, before moving to New York City. His early projects include Sex, an exploration of fetish practices such as workers in sex clubs, bondage, and bestiality; Miami Crime, developing over two years Weil spent with Miami Police Department detectives during homicide investigations; and Hasidim, for which Weil lived with insular Hasidic Jewish communities in Brooklyn and the Catskills.

Weil became involved in the AIDS crisis as a volunteer and organizer in the mid-1980s; he volunteered with Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and later joined ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Weil traveled to Liverpool, Haiti, Bangkok, Santo Domingo, Zimbabwe, and South Africa to research and document responses to the AIDS pandemic, as well as to aid in the establishment of community-based AIDS organizations. In the 1990s Weil helped found the first needle exchange program in New York City, and worked with a group that became the New York Harm Reduction Educators to study the spread of AIDS and develop needle exchange programs. His series The AIDS Photographs were the photographic product of his work during the HIV epidemic, as was his book Every 17 Seconds: A Global Perspective on the AIDS Crisis.

Weil also worked on a multi-channel video documentary of the gender transition of Susan, a transgender U.S. Army Special Ops veteran, a project that spanned three years and was left unfinished. The photographic process employed by Weil involved re-photographing frames from Super-8 film strips, manipulating the negatives by scratching, dodging, and burning them in the darkroom, and enlarging images to exaggerate their graininess. These techniques were used alongside descriptive titles and text to combat the reduction of his subjects to a spectacle. Weil died in 1996 at the age of 41.