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A photograph taken by Danny Lyon on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington. |
VINCE ALETTI, NEW YORKER
Danny Lyon’s career would make a great bio-pic. The New York City photographer, who, at seventy-four, is the subject of the Whitney’s terrific survey “Message to the Future,” has led an improbably adventurous life, beginning with his involvement in the civil-rights movement. In 1963, when he was twenty-one, he became the staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The year before, on his first trip to the South, Lyon ended up in a Georgia jail, with Martin Luther King, Jr., in a nearby cell. Over the next few years, he documented marches, sit-ins, arrests, and the aftermaths of bombings.
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Danny Lyon: Arrest of Taylor Washington, Atlanta, 1963 |
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USA. Birmingham, Alabama. 1963. Members of the Alabama Highway Patrol |
Lyon’s 1963 picture of a boy shouting while confined in a choke hold by an Atlanta policeman became an icon of the civil-rights movement and a breakthrough for the photographer. “I had fallen into one of the great stories of our times,” he later wrote, and he continued to find them. After his work with the S.N.C.C., Lyon, already a biker himself, joined the Outlaws, a Chicago motorcycle club, whose members he photographed at their homes and on the road. The series provided an insider’s view of the outsider life: the camaraderie and competition, the alcohol-fueled oblivion, and the glamour of life on the edge.
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Danny Lyon: Cal on the Springfield Run, Illinois, 1966 |
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Crossing the Ohio, Louisville 1966 |
In 1967, Lyon talked his way into the Texas prison system, where he spent fourteen months taking pictures in six different prisons. At the Whitney, the selections from that project (accompanied by two brief silent videos) are shockingly matter-of-fact studies of institutional inhumanity and the men who endure it. At the time, the work confirmed Lyon’s position as a concerned photographer in the classic mold of W. Eugene Smith and Gordon Parks. But he has remained a maverick throughout his long career—an irritant to the system and an ally to the outcast. Lyon made lifelong friends of some of the Texas inmates.
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Danny Lyon: Weight lifters, Ramsey Unit, Texas, 1968 |
He was in New York City in 1966, when demolition began on the sixty acres below Canal Street that would include the World Trade Center; he spent the next year recording some of the city’s oldest buildings before and after they fell to the wrecking ball. … The restraint of these images, which were published in the 1969 book “The Destruction of Lower Manhattan,” is unexpectedly moving.
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185 West Street at Chambers 1967 |
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West Street at Beach 1967 |
Lyon, ever restless, threw himself back into the great, troubled world, and he has continued to empathize with the displaced and the dispossessed, insuring that their struggles don’t go unseen.
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NY REVIEW OF BOOKS |
Danny Lyon’s still pictures—the work for which this restless photographer, filmmaker, and writer has always been best known—often center on people hanging out and killing time. Since 1962, when he hitchhiked from Chicago to segregated Illinois to take the first of the incendiary civil rights protest photographs that earned him his initial acclaim, Lyon has spent much of his career making intimate images of marginal, working-class, and outlaw communities. Many of the most striking pictures in the Whitney Museum’s new survey, “Danny Lyon: Message to the Future,” organized by the San Francisco-based curator Julian Cox and overseen by the Whitney’s Elisabeth Sussman, come from these milieus:
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Clifford Vaughs, another SNCC photographer, is arrested by the National Guard |
Lyon has always taken risks to earn the status of sympathetic insider in the communities he shoots. The photographs he took across the South in his early twenties were forceful enough visions of outrage and disgust—a group of young black women languishing in the Leesburg stockade; a protestor splayed out in midair as the object of a violent tug-of-war contest between an onlooker and a pack of riot police—that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) soon made Lyon their staff photographer. (One of his pictures, of a grim-looking cop crossing his arms, appeared on the organization’s posters emblazoned with the slogan “Is He Protecting You?”) Lyon would never align himself so completely with another group’s mission and goals, but most of his subsequent projects have involved a similar degree of intense, life-consuming commitment. To make The Bikeriders (1968), the first book of photographs for which he had sole credit, he spent a year as a member of the Chicago Outlaws; for Conversations with the Dead (1971), his third book, he lived in Texas for still longer taking pictures in the state’s prisons.
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Mary, Santa Marta, Columbia, from the portfolio “Danny Lyon” Lyon, Danny 1972, portfolio 1979 |
Between 1965 and 1973, he photographed poor Appalachian transplants in Chicago, prostitutes and homeless children in Santa Marta, Colombia, trans women of color in Galveston, and undocumented workers in New Mexico, one of whom he helped cross a roadblock while the two of them were building an adobe house.
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Maricopa County, Arizona, 1977 |
A deeply ingrained curiosity; a readiness to put himself in dangerous or unfamiliar settings; a sometimes ethically perilous refusal to judge—the qualities that emerge in Lyon’s work on view at the Whitney make one wonder how he gained the degree of confidence with his subjects he seems to enjoy.
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Danny Lyon: Tesca, Cartagena, Colombia, 1966 |
But the greatest revelations in the show come from another body of Lyon’s work Cox and his collaborators have prominently featured—his little-known documentary films.
Lyon made Soc. Sci. 127 (1969)—the mischievous study of a Texas tattoo artist that became his first film….since the early Seventies his films have taken up much of his energy. For Lyon, filmmaking has become a chance to capture the drift and tempo of the hangout sessions, conversations, and daily interactions from which his photographs come.
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Danny Lyon: Bill Sanders, Tattoo Artist, Houston, Texas, 1968 |
Character portraits of irregular lengths and digressive shapes, Lyon’s films have never enjoyed as bright a profile as his photographs. And yet they are secret treasures of nonfiction cinema—plainspoken, offhandedly beautiful, rich, and troubling …Like Lyon’s photographs, these movies consist largely of characters rambling, whiling away time, and going about their business seemingly unhindered. For the homeless children at the center of Los Niños Abandonados (1975), which Lyon shot in Santa Marta, that business involves sleeping outside churches, collecting leftovers from the tables of cafes, swimming in rivers and cooking what look like chicken feet.
The primary characters in Willie (1985), some of whom Lyon earlier filmed in Llanito(1971) and Little Boy (1977)—a mentally unstable New Mexico ex-convict named Willie Jaramillo, his brother, his young nephew, and the prisoners with whom he served time—spend the film riding in pickup trucks, listening to music, and, in the case of the inmates, lifting weights in a break room Lyon depicts as a chaotic, noisy social center. (The Whitney is showing Willie, Soc. Sci. 127, and Dear Mark (1981), a jokey short view of Lyon’s friend Mark di Suvero making one of his large sculptures, looped in two cordoned-off rooms.)
Not all of Lyon’s film work concerns particular characters and communities. He has also made forthrightly autobiographical movies like Media Man (1994) and Born to Film, ..;Recalling the scrapbook-like photo collages—he calls them “montages”—Lyon has made since the late Sixties, Born to Film is a poignant glimpse of the home life Lyon has sustained amid many trips and re-locations. But it’s pictures like the ones in Conversations with the Dead and films like Willie and Los Niños Abandonados that best suggest what makes Lyon such a thrilling artist: his intense impulse to familiarize himself with lives wildly different from his own.
“Danny Lyon: Message to the Future,” is on view at the Whitney Museum in New York through September 25. Excerpts of his films can be found on Lyon’s website, BleakBeauty.com.
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Danny Lyon, MTA Subway, NYC, 1966 |
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Union Square station. New York City, 1966 |
5 STAR FINAL 