gerous and exciting life of motorcycle riders from the
perspective of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club.
Lyon became a proud member of the Outlaws, travel-
ing with them, sharing their lifestyle, and photograph-
ing them from 1963 to 1967. His next book,
Conversations with the Deadwas published in 1971.
Over a period of 14 months Lyon was allowed access
to the Texas prison system. His photographs explored
the lives of those incarcerated in six Texas prisons.
The publication included texts taken from prison
records and convicts’ writings, particularly the letters
of Billy McCune, a convicted rapist whose death
sentencewascommutedtolifeinprison.While
many of Lyon’s books have had a great influence on
the social documentary tradition,The Bikeridersand
Conversations with The Dead became seminal exam-
ples of the new style of modern photojournalism.
Lyon’s subsequent books are distinctive in their
inter-weaving of photographs, text, interviews, and
sometimes fiction. As published works, each project
combined Lyon’s searing photographic images with
his and his subject’s first person observations, giv-
ing the reader a fuller picture of the complex world
Lyon often spent years investigating. This format
contrasted sharply with the more traditional photo
book model of the time, where image and text occu-
pied distinct areas of a publication. Lyon, however,
has maintained this practice throughout his career,
even though he believed that it made many mu-
seums reluctant to show his work.
In the late1960s, Lyon embarked on a major ser-
ies documenting the destruction of an area of lower
Manhattan through urban renewal. Photographing
buildings over a 12-block area, Lyon captured the
end of an architectural era and also made portraits
of some of its inhabitants. Dozens of Manhattan’s
nineteenth century buildings were soon to be demol-
ished to make way for renovations to the Brooklyn
Bridge and the construction of the World Trade
Center. After this series was published as The
Destruction of Lower Manhattan, Lyon worked
sporadically for the federal government as a photo-
grapher. From 1972 through 1974 he completed a
number of assignments for the Environmental Pro-
tection Agency’s DOCUMERICA project. During
this time he photographed extensively in Texas
including the Rio Grande Valley and the Chicano
barrios of South El Paso and Houston. In 1974, he
photographed the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of
Brooklyn, New York. Like his earlier documentary
studies of marginalized groups, Lyon’s images from
these assignments mirror his concerns of commu-
nity. They depict ethnic neighborhoods struggling
under the pressure of outside forces, including fed-
erally driven policies such as urban renewal. Lyon’s
humanistic approach is revealed in sequences of
images that not only record ethnic communities
before they are destroyed, but also express an inti-
macy and respect for the individuals he has come to
know through the process of documenting them.
While not nearly as well known as his still photo-
graphy, Lyon has pursued documentary filmmak-
ing since the late 1960s. Over the years he has
gained recognition as a skilled and thoughtful film-
maker. His films includeSoc. Sci. 127(1969),Little
Boy (1977),Los Ninos Abandonados(The Aban-
doned Children, 1975),Born to Film(1982), and
Media Man (1994). Working simultaneously in
film and still photography, Lyon has recorded
many of the same Latino and Native American
communities in both mediums. In 1979, a decade
after being awarded a Guggenheim Foundation
Fellowship in photography, he was awarded
another in film.
During the 1980s, Lyon became increasingly
interested in mixing autobiographical themes into
his work. As a result, old family photographs, his
own images of his wife and children, as well as
autobiographical texts became familiar elements
in works such as the 1982 filmBorn to Film, and
the booksI Like to Eat Right on The Dirt(1989),
and the autobiographical monograph Knave of
Hearts(1999). In 1990, a major traveling retrospec-
tive of his work entitledDanny Lyon: Photo Film.
1959–1990was mounted by the Folkwang Museum
in Essen, Germany, and the Center for Creative
Photography in Tucson, Arizona.
While his work has been included in countless
group and solo exhibitions through out North
America and Europe, Lyon’s philosophy about the
power and responsibility of documentary image-
making are best expressed in his book projects.
The importance of photography’s accessibility and
its potential for social and political change have
been the driving force that has lead him to work
extensively in the American South, the Southwest,
Mexico, Haiti, and Cuba. In keeping with his inter-
est in democratizing the photographic image, Lyon
has created a website (www.BleakBeauty.com)
which not only displays his work for a broad audi-
ence but also provides a discussion forum and an
outlet for his political views:
When activist photography appeared on the scene in the
early 1960s we assumed that a revolution was at hand...
The marriage of the B&W photograph with the offset
printing press was a marriage made in heaven; for the
realistic picture could be reproduced and available to
thousands for a reasonable amount of cash. This happy
marriage should have spawned dozens of picture-maga-
zines helping to radicalize America and putting theLYON, DANNY