In 2023, Will Vogt published a monograph that gave a strikingly candid insight into the excesses of upper-class American life: the yachts, the druggy parties, the exotic pets, the blood sports. Entitled These Americans and mainly focused on the decadent 1980s, it gathered Vogt’s photographs of a milieu to which he was, as it happened, no stranger. As Jay McInerney wrote in the book’s introduction, referencing the East Coast elite that F Scott Fitzgerald had anatomised decades earlier, Vogt “is clearly a member of this tribe, albeit a self-aware and observant one”.
Now Vogt is releasing a book of more recent work that features “that same group of people, but they’re a little more mature”. Gone are “the cocaine, the blowjobs and, you know, just normal 80s stuff”, as he puts it to me.
In Behind the Hedges, we’ve entered an age of golfing weekends and shooting drives, with the occasional decorous garden party thrown in.
This photograph shows the aftermath of a quail hunt at a property in south Texas, not far from where Vogt lives. The 4x4 vehicle in the background is known as a quail rig, and the display of tiny dead birds on either side of the woman in pink is, Vogt says, “an American imitation of the tableau [of shot game] in front of the castle, as they do in Europe”.
Once again, Vogt is not merely an observer of the scene; he’s also a keen participant, as is his wife, Jennifer, pictured far left. The man on the right “is my guru: he probably knows more about quail hunting than anybody alive”. The property owner and his wife (in pink) are perched at the centre.
Usually such portraits of the so-called 1% are biting and satirical – think of Martin Parr’s Luxury or Lauren Greenfield’s Generation Wealth. Behind the Hedges acknowledges wealth inequality in the introduction, and quotes Fitzgerald on the “vast carelessness” of rich people in its epigraph, but otherwise it does not judge. Instead, Vogt throws open the door to this cloistered world, with its recherché rituals and passed-down privileges, and invites us to make up our own minds.
Behind the Hedges by Will Vogt will be published by Schilt Publishing and Gallery on 19 April