page_title: Danny Lyon
section_title: Later work
hierarchical_section_title: Danny Lyon / Later work
caption_attribution_description: English: "Three boys and 'A Train' graffiti in Brooklyn's Lynch Park in New York City. The inner city today is an absolute contradiction to the main stream America of gas stations, expressways, and tract homes. It is populated by Blacks, Latins, and the white poor. Most of all the inner city environment is human beings as beautiful and threatened as the 19th century buildings." Brooklyn, New York, New York.
context_page_description: Danny Lyon is an American photographer and filmmaker.
  All of Lyon's publications work in the style of photographic New Journalism, meaning that the photographer has become immersed in with, and is a participant of, the documented subject. He is the founding member of the publishing group Bleak Beauty.
  After being accepted as the photographer for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lyon was present at almost all of the major historical events during the Civil Rights Movement.
  He has had solo exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Lyon twice received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Rockefeller Fellowship, Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism; and a Lucie Award.
context_section_description: Later, Lyon began creating his own books. His first, was a study of outlaw motorcyclists in the collection The Bikeriders (1968), where Lyon did more than just photograph motorcyclists in the American Midwest from 1963 to 1967. Additionally, he also became a member of the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club and traveled with them, sharing their lifestyle. According to Lyon himself, the photographs were "an attempt to record and glorify the life of the American bikerider." The series was immensely popular and influential in the 1960s and 1970s. By 1967 he was invited to join Magnum Photos. He never became a full member.  During the 1970s, he also contributed to the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA project.
  In 1969, when Lyon returned from his work in Texas to New York City, and had no place to live, the photographer Robert Frank, famous by then for his book  The Americans, took him in.  Lyon lived with the Frank family for six months in New York City, in an apartment on West 86th St.
  The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969) was Lyon's next work, published by Macmillan Publishers in 1969.  The book documents the large-scale demolition taking place throughout Lower Manhattan in 1967.  Included are photographs of soon to be demolished streets and buildings, portraits of the neighborhood's last remaining stragglers and pictures from within the demolition sites themselves.  The book was eventually remaindered for one dollar each, but soon attained the status of a collector's item.  It was reprinted in 2005.
  Conversations with the Dead (1971) was published with full cooperation of the Texas Department of Corrections. Lyon photographed in six prisons over a 14-month period in 1967-68. The series was printed in book form in 1971 by Holt publishing. The introduction points to a statement of purpose that the penal system of Texas is symbolic for incarceration everywhere. He states, "I tried with whatever power I had to make a picture of imprisonment as distressing as I knew it to be in reality."
  Lyon befriended many of the prisoners. The book also includes texts taken from prison records, letters from convicts, and inmate artwork. In particular, the book focuses on the case of Billy McCune, a convicted rapist whose death sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison. In the foreword, Lyon describes McCune as a diagnosed psychotic, who one evening, while awaiting execution, "cut his penis off to the root and, placing it in a cup, passed it between the bars to the guard."
  All of Lyon's publications work in the style of photographic New Journalism, meaning that the photographer has become immersed, and is a participant, of the documented subject.
  He is the founding member of the publishing group Bleak Beauty. He was greatly encouraged in his photography by curator of the Art Institute of Chicago Hugh Edwards, who gave Lyon two solo exhibits as a young man.
  Also a filmmaker and writer, Lyon's films and videos include Los Niños Abandonados, Born to Film, Willie, and Murderers. He has published the non-fiction book Like A Thief's Dream.
caption: "Three boys and 'A Train' graffiti in Brooklyn's Lynch Park in New York City." By Danny Lyon, Brooklyn, NY, July 1974
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