[1] His books, which combine historical photographs with original writing, include Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties (1976), Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life (1982), Visible Light (1985), Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (2007), Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century (with Lisa Stoffer, 2013), Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (2017), and Snapshots 1971–77 (September 2021).
[4] Wisconsin Death Trip, Lesy's first book, was adapted into a film by James Marsh in 1999.
[5][6] Ironically, Lesy explained in a 2003 interview, "I wanted to make it a movie.
"[3] Wisconsin Death Trip was presented on the BBC documentary series Arena in 2000.
[7] In 2006 the United States Artists Foundation named Lesy its first Simon Fellow.