Danny Lyon

American, born 1942

Location of BirthBrooklyn, New York, United States of America, North America

Active LocationAlbuquerque, New Mexico, United States of America, North America

BiographyBorn in Queens, New York, Lyon attended the University of Chicago and while a student he began working as the photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In that role, he met SNCC co-founder Julian Bond, future Congressman John Lewis, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and traveled with them to document their work. Lyon’s photographs from this period remain a primary record of the group’s efforts to achieve equality and racial justice.

Lyon is associated with the New Journalism movement, championed by writers Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, in which writers and photographers became personally involved with the subjects they were covering. After his work with SNCC, Lyon rode with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club and documented their lifestyle, which culminated in his first book, The Bikeriders (1968). The Magnum Photos cooperative invited him to join their ranks.

In 1967, Lyon spent six months documenting the destruction of nineteenth-century buildings in lower Manhattan and the following fourteen months embedded in six Texas prisons with nearly unrestricted access granted by the Texas Department of Corrections. He documented the daily lives of incarcerated individuals sentenced to life imprisonment or living on death row, capturing the grim conditions and forced labor common to these facilities. Lyon also included reproductions of drawings and texts from one of the incarcerated men he met, Billy McCune. By the early 1970s, he was drawing colored and patterned borders and other additions directly on the gelatin silver prints, which were often publicly exhibited attached to walls with thumbtacks, without mats and frames.

In 1970, Lyon and his wife Nancy purchased a property in New Mexico and began building an adobe house in the village El Llanito near Bernalillo. Around 1969, Lyon had turned his attention largely to film, creating a body of raw, direct documents in which his subjects loosely narrate their mundane, disenfranchised lives. Significant in this body of work is his footage of Latino boys in his neighborhood (“Llanito,” 1971; “Little Boy” 1977; “Willie” 1985) deeply tinged with Lyon’s affection and concern for kids living with violence, addiction, and incarceration on their journey to becoming young men. By the end of the 1970s, the Lyons left New Mexico to raise their family in New York state, though they maintain their home in Bernalillo. In 1979, the artist turned his attention to making collages, which he calls montages, and working in a family album format that combines multiple images, moments, and time frames for storytelling.

In the prolific decade from 1964 to 1973, Lyon published five books of his photographic work, bringing his subjects to broader attention and advocating for the photographic series (and film), rather than stand-alone images, as a powerful form of communication. Together, they form a deeply subjective, empathetic view of a startling range of marginalized individuals, subcultures, and dissidents.

Person TypeIndividual