Every Seventeen Seconds: A Global Perspective on the AIDS Crisis

By Brian Weil

In Every 17 Seconds, Brian Weil has produced a sensitive, informed, and global work in response to the AIDS crisis. With abstract yet pressing reality, Weil's work transcends the specifics of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0893815241
• ISBN13: 9780893815240
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Aperture
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 0.4" x 10.7"

Customer Reviews

Documentary photography & political activism are combined.

In the course of his photographic career Brian Weil became a well-known AIDS activist. His photographic work experimented with the opacity of photographic imagery. His use of grain, contrast, lack of detail were, in a sense, a confrontation with orthodoxies of photojournalism & documentary, forms meant to be a seamless window onto "reality." He questioned the veracity of photographs; he criticized documentary practices as resulting ultimately in making a "fashion of disaster", an easily consumable, easily forgotten, apolitical spectacle. Likewise, in his photography he meant to avoid the literal. In the AIDS photographs he was aware of the misuses of images of people with AIDS, the fears that could be inspired, the separation between "us" & "them". By minimizing detail, by never directly showing illness by itself, but instead showing scenes of the struggles involved, from hospital to voodoo doctor, from demonstration to funeral, scenes in New York, Liverpool,the Dominican Republic, Thailand, South Africa - one sees a breadth of social vision & a sense of involvement unlike anything in traditional photojournalism. At the time of his death Weil was though of most commonly as an AIDS activist, but his artistry is of an equal order in its uncompromising eclecticism & experimentation. The major flaw of the book is the printing, which is flat & uninteresting. The prints themselves are luminous, although not of what has been known as photographic "quality."