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Artists & Works
Danny Lyon
American (b. 1942)
from CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD (1970)
4 silver prints
each 11” x 14"

STYLE: 70S PHOTOGRAPHY

 

One of the most prominent and influential photojournalists of the late twentieth century, Danny Lyon is self-taught as a photographer. He grew up in Forest Hills, New York and attended the University of Illinois where he received a B.A. in history. That year, he began documenting the civil rights movement (The Movement, 1964) as a member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. Lyon went on to photograph bikers (Bikeriders, 1968) and demolition in TriBeca (The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, 1969). In recent years, Lyon has photographed the 1994 revolution in Haiti, the Sioux, Apache, and other western Indian nations, and other, more personal subjects. Lyon has also produced a number of documentary films. His photographs are in the collections of major contemporary art museums and he has received many honors for his documentary work.

At the time Lyon made the photographs in Conversations With the Dead, photographers were rarely allowed in prisons. Lyon was able to make a connection with University at Buffalo professor and documentary filmmaker Bruce Jackson, who was doing a project on the Texas prison system; Jackson vouched for Lyon to the Texas authorities. Lyon photographed seven prisons in the system in 1967-68, resulting in the book Coversations with the Dead (1971). The book includes letters and drawings from Billy McCune, one of the inmates Lyon met. These photographs demonstrate Lyon's personal approach to documentary photography; he was attracted to his subjects and had an emotional connection to them, which is clearly evident.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Interview with Nan Goldin, Artforum, 9/95
“Lyon is a journalist, but not by the usual '90s definition. Whether he was photographing the Civil Rights Movement in the American South in the '60s or the guerrilla uprising in Mexico in the '90s, his journalism is not about the surface, the sensational, the soundbite; it is imbued with his respect for the people he photographs, and with the commitment and responsibility this respect entails.
…D.L: At that time working in a prison was a romantic concept to me. I came from Queens, I went to Forest Hills High School, I went to the University of Chicago, so prison was completely foreign to me. And prisons weren't photographed then, you never saw inside a prison. The public knew nothing about prisons. When Tom Wicker, one of the hot reporters for the New York Times back then, was told there was a rebellion in Attica, he said, What's Attica? And that was in '71, four years after I began this story. That's the way it was, that's the way they wanted it. And I distinctly remember thinking, if I could get inside a prison that would be very amazing.
…Six years after Conversations with the Dead was published, it was used by the U.S. Justice Department in a massive lawsuit against the Texas prison system. The pictures were introduced as evidence. I testified.
NG: Did the prison administration feel you'd betrayed them?
DL: I felt I had a right to betray people who do what they do. I felt that was my job. The prisoners won the suit, the prison system was changed.
NG: How did conditions improve?
DL: Actually it's supposed to be worse now. Since then the demographics of prison have just gone the other way; the prison population has quadrupled since I photographed in Texas a generation ago. Still, my photographs were used by people who meant well to try to change prison conditions, and for a while prison conditions were forced to change.”
Charles Hagen, New York Times, 1/20/95
“In his next major documentary, a study of Texas prisons, Mr. Lyon's sympathies again lay with outsiders and underdogs, in this case the prisoners. He included a wide range of documents in the book, including arrest records and excerpts from prisoners' letters; a section of the book is devoted to watercolors and writing by an inmate.
…It is Mr. Lyon's ability to shape scenes into formally elegant and evocative pictures that makes his work stand out from that of other documentary photographers. A picture from the prisons project shows a group of inmates, dressed in white prison uniforms, chopping up a fallen tree in the woods; scattered across the frame and arranged against the tangled background, the men look like figures woven into a tapestry.
A shot of two inmates playing dominoes, taken from above, has a similar visual complexity. But Mr. Lyon never lost sight of the human reality of what he was photographing; in an image of a young wife visiting her husband, taken from the prisoner's side of a glass partition, two children can be seen playing in the background.”

Andy Grundberg, New York Times, 9/20/81
"Lyon, born in 1942, is one of a handful of photographers keeping alive the vernacular documentary tradition of Robert Frank, whose idiosyncratic ally styled masterpiece, ''The Americans' (1955), marks a watershed in post-war American photography. If the present show does nothing else it proves that this tradition continues to be a vital means of picture-making. But Lyon's slangy snapshot style is only part of what he is about. He is also capable of considered, large-format images that are delicately proportioned. Unlike most so-called street shooters, he is a fine printmaker, as willing as W. Eugene Smith was to manipulate the tonal values of his black-and white prints. Moreover, his work spans an unusually wide range of locales, subjects and feelings, from candids of beggars and prostitutes in Colombia to family snapshots of his son and daughter aglow with pictorialist sentiment. What most unites him with Frank is that his pictures proceed from a conscious, complex, but poised view of American culture. (Where Frank dealt with one America, Lyon encompasses two - North and South.) It is a position at once skeptical and sentimental - which is to say that Lyon is essentially a romantic."