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In plane sight: how the gilded elite live – in pictures

From golf tournaments to shooting parties, these images of photographer Will Vogt’s social circle offer us an intimate glimpse of a world that feels out of reach Continue reading…

Guardian Staff
April 30, 2026
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Dancing on AphroditeFor nearly 60 years, Will Vogt has photographed his social circle: at hunting estates, weddings, annual rituals, exclusive club lunches and golf weekends. Behind the Hedges, Will Vogt’s second monograph, gives us access to this privileged community. Behind the Hedges is avialble from Schilt Publishing. Quotes by Will Vogt. Text by the book’s editor, Jennifer Garza-Cuen, from her essay Posture of Privilege

Wedding Parade In Watch Hill, near Newport, Rhode Island, there lies a well-established seaside community where many of the same families continue to gather each summer, as their parents and grandparents did before them. Vogt’s images offer an intimate insider’s view of this American upper class lifestyle. Here we see a Watch Hill wedding procession making their way from the Chapel to the reception at the Ocean House

Voyage to Uruguay Vogt’s images draw power from their tension between proximity and distance, functioning as portraits of a class oriented toward preservation within a nation otherwise defined by reinvention. They depict a community adept at weathering change while maintaining its habit of self-reproduction. Vogt says of this image: ‘This was taken from the airstrip on my first trip to San Jose, arriving with our shooting party in Uruguay on a Gulfstream from Dallas’

Pool Party in Watch Hill‘In 1966, to survive the bleakness of The Hill School, an all-boys’ boarding school, I leaned heavily on the early-60s music of the British invasion pouring out of a transistor radio, followed by the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and, not long after, the discovery of Bob Dylan. His songs revealed the power of language and sparked a lifelong love of singer-songwriters. I also leaned heavily on the writing of F Scott Fitzgerald, to survive the grim reality of it all’

Rainbow Over Jimmy’s ‘With my first camera, those musical and literary influences began to surface on strips of Tri-X film hanging from clothes lines, as the school darkroom became my refuge from the drudgery of campus life. The early influence of Robert Frank – and later works by Allen Frame, as well as the mentorship of Jennifer Garza-Cuen – further shaped my way of seeing. Here I photographed a double rainbow over one of the best partridge drives in Wiltshire as the team gets ready for the birds to fly’

Children at Play‘Children playing on Labor Day in Watch Hill. A bittersweet day that signified summer’s end with a annual event at the golf club where winners of tennis and golf tournaments are recognised’

Butterflies We live a new gilded age of vast wealth inequality. The spaces of privilege and those who inhabit them continue to exist as a world unto themselves. Wealth functions as a protective layer; while the very rich encounter many of the same challenges inherent to being human, as well as those reserved solely for them, the knife’s edge of life has been tempered and polished to a buttery smoothness

WhistleVogt’s images in Behind the Hedges mark a shift from his first monograph’s raw snapshot aesthetic toward tableau. However, these are not carefully constructed scenes, rather they are lived spaces that cohere into tableaus through framing and vantage point. Here the Beach Crew gathers, marking the start of another summer day at the Ocean House beach in Watch Hill

Men with Guns in HeloVogt’s subject matter remains as consistent as the world that raised him. He directs his lens toward the enclaves behind the hedges where the choreography of privilege unfolds with ritualistic regularity

Lunch in the FieldThese images do not announce themselves with spectacle. They are measured and exacting with insider fluency and imbued with the restraint the culture they depict prizes. Vogt captures the posture of inheritance where structures are held in balance, colour is purposeful, and humour –when it arrives – slips in on the back of understatement

Ladies at the Beach Vogt’s work offers not revelation but recognition – the sense that we have been granted a sustained look at a place that is both near and afar, ordinary and impossible. These pictures remind us that privilege is a design that persists precisely because it feels natural to those dwelling in it

Loser ‘One of the biggest social events of the summer in Watch Hill is the annual golf tournament Saturday night party. Members over 21 are welcome to attend’

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