1972 through to 1977. In 1983, he organized Oracle,
now an international organization of directors and
curators of photographic institutions that meets
annually to discuss a variety of issues and topics
related to photography.
Lyons’s various accomplishments are all based on
his identity as a scholar. As the author and editor of
numerous books and exhibition catalogues, his
writings have sought to define the capabilities of
the image-making process specific to photographic
practice. In doing so, he has encouraged the devel-
opment of a history of photography as well as
stimulated a ‘‘discussion of photography as an
expressive medium,’’ as Lyons wrote in the catalo-
gue essay to his 1967 exhibition for Eastman House,
Photography in the Twentieth Century, 1967. The
exhibition consisted of photographs from the
George Eastman House’s collection, including
work by Diane Arbus, Bill Brandt, Harry Callahan,
Robert Capa, Mario Giacomelli, Eikoh Hosoe, Ray
K. Metzker, Lisette Model, Duane Michels, Freder-
ick Sommer, Edward Steichen, and Jerry Uelsmann,
to name just a few who were included and who
demonstrate the range of possibilities in and app-
roaches to photography. This exhibition was one of
many he organized during his time as Associate
Director and Curator of Photography at the George
Eastman House until 1969, when he left to become
the founding Director of the Photographic Studies
Workshop (now Visual Studies Workshop), a me-
dia arts center and one of the first alternative orga-
nizations of its kind in the country.
Considering his own personal, photographic pro-
jects, Lyons carefully organizes his photographs by
presenting them as diptychs, juxtaposing image
next to image in sequences, thereby revealing how
meaning is constructed and how interpretation is
structured by sets of juxtapositions. Since 1956, he
has been engaged in creating sequences of images
with words appearing in the frame and playing an
important role in the formation of meaning.
In 1962, Lyons set aside his view camera for a 35
mm camera, and has thought of the work produced
after this year as eventually forming a trilogy start-
ing withNotations in Passing, published in 1974, his
first attempt at creating photographic sequences
that set the pace for his approach and provided an
introduction to his visual vocabulary. For several
years he was involved in recording the urban and
suburban landscapes as well as documenting the
man-made in the rural environment. Meditative in
its presentation,Notationspossesses a rhythm that
captures the poetics of human intervention in the
landscape. There are no essays or texts accompany-
ing the images, except for one word, ‘‘Introduction,’’
printed at the start of the book. In retrospect, this
serves as an apt beginning for what was to come in
subsequent years in his career as a photographer.
His second photographic project in the ‘‘trilogy’’
isRiding 1st Class on the Titanic!, which took 13
years to complete and reflects many of the same
concerns as Robert Frank’sThe Americans. From
1974 to 1987 Lyons photographed storefront win-
dows, graffiti, bumper stickers, and billboards,
among others urban displays. The title of the
book is taken from an inscription that appears in
one of the photographs, which captures a graffiti-
sprayed wall.
Lyons’s most recent publication,After 9/11, pub-
lished by Yale University Art Gallery, is a visual
record of the varied responses and reactions by
Americans to the devastating tragedy of the terror-
ist attack that led to the collapse of the World Trade
Center. Lyons engaged in recording the collective
response in cities and towns across the United
States, including New York. Over the course of 13
months he photographed man-made compositions
he discovered in the landscape that mimicked the
American flag. The flag is present in a number of
these photographs, but when not included, Lyons
frames the scene and presents it in a horizontal
format so as to construct an image that represents
and takes the form of the American flag.
Lyons’s photographs have been included in a
number of exhibitions and are in the permanent
collections of the Addison Gallery of American
Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Amon Carter Mu-
seum, Fort Worth, Texas; Center for Creative
Photography, Tucson, Arizona; International Cen-
ter of Photography, New York; Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, Texas; Museum of Modern Art,
New York; and the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, California, to name just a few. He
has lectured extensively on photography and pho-
tographic education, and continues to teach work-
shops at the Visual Studies Workshop, such as
Image, Sequence, Series, which examines narrative
and non-narrative structures employed as a strategy
in photographic practices. In 2001, he left his posi-
tion as Director of the Visual Studies Workshop,
but continues his involvement as Director Emeritus
at the Workshop and as a member of the Board of
Directors. He is also Distinguished Professor Emer-
itus at SUNY Brockport, New York. Whether he is
photographing, writing, curating, lecturing, or edit-
ing Lyons’s perceptive, intuitive, and full engage-
ment with the world around him, and therefore the
world of images, results in an honest response to his
environment and a body of photographic work that
as Adam D. Weinberg wrote ‘‘provide[s] a contin-LYONS, NATHAN