Under political pressure, network ABC withdrew the ad, but the agency managed to land five slots on NBC's popular late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live.

[22] Artnet describes The End as a blend of nostalgia, documentary and fantasy, with photos that evoke "the paradise of summer, youth, and erotic possibility, and of community and camaraderie in a perfect setting.

As art editor Christopher Sweet described them in his introduction to the book, “Whether diving in the blue refractions of a swimming pool or suspended like a seraph in the cool, pellucid depths of a spring or emerging tentatively onto a rocky shore, Michael Dweck's mermaids are lovely and aloof and bare of all raiment but for their beautiful manes and the elemental draperies that surround them.

Water, light, and lens converge to capture in modern guise the elusive creature of myth.”[34] Like his previous book, The End: Montauk, N.Y., Mermaids was inspired by Dweck's experiences interacting with the local environment.

[38] To obtain the desired angles for the shots, Dweck used two different techniques, diving into the water with his subjects, either with a long snorkel or unaided, and shooting from behind a glass wall placed within the river.

I said to myself, "OK, I have light, I have a lens and I have water"[35]Rather than use professional models, Dweck turned to women with the experience needed to move comfortably and naturally in underwater environments, including friends from his native Long Island's East End as well as residents of the rural fishing village Aripeka, Florida.

[38] [40][41][42] According to Christopher Sweet, Dweck met a performer who had been raised in Aripeka and had spent her life in and around water, who then introduced him to other local girls, “some of whom could hold their breath underwater for as long as five or six minutes.”[34] Photographs from Mermaids were exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, London, Belgium and Hamburg.

[50][51] Other subjects of the book include musicians Francis de Rio and Kelvis Ochoa, painters René Francisco, Rachel Valdez and Carlos Quintana, dancer Yaday Ponce Toscano and novelist Leonardo Padura.

[50] Writing for Spain's El País, exiled Cuban poet and essayist Antonio José Ponte observed that these children of revolutionaries had departed from the discretion of previous generations, who'd felt obliged to hide their relative wealth in a political environment of egalitarianism and asceticism, and interpreted their surprising willingness to reveal their lifestyles to an American photographer as a reaction against the constraints of Cuba's Communist Party.

[52] The Miami New Times's Kyle Munzenrieder commented that "it's hard to tell if [Dweck is] glamorizing the privilege or slyly exposing the hypocrisy of the myth of communist equality".

Dweck drew parallels between elite Havana and Montauk, observing, "Here are two worldly paradises, both built-up in the 50s and preserved since – for better or worse; both populated by insular groups in some kind of isolation, whether it's self or externally imposed; both beset by threats from without and by new hierarchies from within.

[58] In late January 2014, selections from Habana Libre were exhibited at Art Palm Beach in West Palm Beach, Florida, with photographer and critic Elin Spring characterizing Dweck's black and white gelatin silver prints as “positively electric.”[59] From September 2017 to March 2018, Dweck's work from Habana Libre appeared in Cuba IS, a multimedia exhibit exploring life in modern Cuba, at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City.

Documentary Competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where it was billed as "A cinematic portrait of a small town stock car track and the tribe of drivers that call it home as they struggle to hold onto an American racing tradition.

[70][71] The Sundance Festival described "showdowns between…Max Max-inspired stock cars do[ing] battle on a quarter-mile track," with viewers placed "eye to eye with the cars’ snarling grills and white roll bars that protrude like bones out of scarred metal" as Dweck "turns the raceway into a theater of catharsis while the track's owners struggle to maintain an American tradition as a real estate boom surrounds them.

[73][74] Riverhead Raceway reminded Dweck of a stock car track near his childhood home in Bellmore, where on Saturday nights he would sneak under the fence to watch the races.

[74][78] To sell the track, as the Florida Film Festival explains it, would "cast adrift the extended tribe of adrenaline-junky drivers, fans, and families, all inexorably linked to the asphalt oval where blue-collar glory still triumphs over white-collar profit.

"[79] The Hollywood Reporter's Justin Lowe observes that the film "represents more of a living document of a dwindling American subculture than a typical sports documentary" in which Dweck "explore[s] themes of masculine identity and class representation that underlie stock car racing," with Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com characterizing the track and its racers as "nutshells of Americana, testosterone and nostalgia.

[73] For the remainder of the soundtrack, Dweck set up microphones around the raceway and in the cars themselves to sample over 4,000 sounds ranging from revving engines and tools being dropped to telephones being answered in the office.

And I have no idea how it gets there.’” Intrigued, Dweck spent much of the next year meeting people in the truffle hunting community, typically in their homes over wine and espresso, and gaining their trust.

[91] The Truffle Hunters continues a theme found throughout Dweck's work, including his previous film The Last Race, of an endangered social enclave threatened by the forces of modernity.

[93][94] Screen Daily's Lee Marshall characterizes the film as "...a lament for a dying trade and the frugal lives of the rural folk who still pursue it ...", calling it and The Last Race "elegies for a disappearing world.

"[94] In the words of executive producer Luca Guadagnino, "The Truffle Hunters is about a group at the end of their lives who see their world fading and their place in reality increasingly on the boundaries…It's about mortality and approaching death," likening it to "a companion piece to The Irishman.

[92][93][94][95] As in The Last Race, the realities of capitalism loom menacingly in the background, not only climate change but also regional economic problems and cutthroat competition, with hunters resorting to elaborate measures to hide their secrets from newcomers who seek to pillage their lands.

"By combining the monumental stillness of each frame with the movement of life and rhythm of editing," he explained, "we sought to construct a film that flowed like a stream of paintings to tell a story that is felt more than understood.

"[96] As film critic Tomris Laffly describes it, "Fusing numerous painterly, layered and romantically lit single-frame shots together, the filmmakers create a sequence of mini episodes, while the human characters and their impossibly cute and clever dogs go on about their daily routine amid these scrumptious tableaux.

"[93] Lee Marshall located the film's milieu in "a real world that is also a magical realist elsewhere" which "leads us into a distant, pre-technological past that still exists in the present and could even be a vision of some strange regressive future.

"[94] The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney praised the film's use of color, "from the variegated shades of the forest to a table of ripe red tomatoes or baskets of succulent green grapes being poured into a barrel for winemaking.

Attached to the dogs' heads using a custom harness, it depicts the action from their points of view, through the hunt to the moment of success when the scent of the hidden truffle is detected.

[105][106] In May 2020, Dweck and Kershaw signed with United Talent Agency to represent Beautiful Stories, a company they formed to produce film and television projects for a global audience.

[115][116] Two wine labels of Nebbiolo and Barolo varieties, which are characteristic of the Piedmont region, were created to help fund the conservation efforts, with proceeds from their sale going to the local Terre di Tartufi (Truffle Lands) organization.