PHOTO:Danny Lyon- Message to the Future
Photographer, filmmaker, and writer Danny Lyon has over the past 50 years presented a charged alternative to the sanitized vision of American life presented in the mass media. A leading figure in the American street photography Lyon has distinguished himself by the personal intimacy he establishes with his subjects and the inventiveness of his practice.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art Archive
The exhibition-retrospective “Danny Lyon: Message to the Future” assembles presents 175 photographs and related films and ephemera to highlight Danny’s Lyon concern with social and political issues and the welfare of individuals considered by many to be on the margins of society. The retrospective includes many objects that have never been exhibited before also is the first exhibition to assess the artist’s achievements as a filmmaker. In the summer of 1962, Lyon hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois, to witness demonstrations and a speech by John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most important organizations driving the civil rights movement of the early ‘60s. Inspired to see the making of history Lyon then headed to the South to participate in and photograph the civil rights movement. There, SNCC recruited Lyon to be the organization’s first official photographer. Traveling throughout the South with SNCC, Lyon documented sit-ins, marches, funerals, and violent clashes with the police, often developing his negatives quickly in makeshift darkrooms. In 1967, Lyon applied to the Texas Department of Corrections for access to the state prisons. Dr. George Beto, then director of the prisons, granted Lyon the right to move freely among the various prison units, which he photographed and filmed extensively. In late 1966 and into the summer of 1967, starting from his loft at the corner of Beekman and William Streets near City Hall Park, Lyon documented the demolition of some sixty acres of predominantly 19th Century buildings below Canal Street in lower Manhattan, he photographed most of the buildings that would be torn down to build for the World Trade Center. Lyon purchased his first motorcycle in 1962, after spending weekends watching Frank Jenner compete at informal dirt track races across the Midwest. When he returned to Chicago in 1965 after leaving SNCC, Lyon joined the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club and began making photographs with a goal to “Record and glorify the life of the American bike-rider”. Riding with the Outlaws, Lyon attempted to capture their way of life from the inside out. Their unapologetic pursuit of freedom and libertine pleasures compelled him to get close to them as people. He also used a tape recorder to document the bikers speaking for themselves, unobtrusively capturing their collective voice. In 1969 tired of the big city and in search of new surroundings, he settled in Sandoval County in New Mexico. He developed a great admiration for the region’s communities of Native Americans and Chicanos. Lyon’s photographs and, films reflected his growing understanding of the cross-cultural flow between these disparate groups and how they interacted with the geography of the Southwest. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Lyon’s self-described “Advocacy journalism” took him to Bolivia, where he captured the hard lives of rural miners, in Mexico he photographed undocumented workers moving back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border and made 2 films “El Mojado” (1974) and “El Otro Lado” (1978), in Colombia,he made the film “Los Niños Abandonados” chronicling the lives of street children, and to Haiti, where he witnessed the violent revolution overthrowing Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship. The period 2005-09 Lyon made six trips to Shanxi province in northeast China. Aided by a guide, he photographed the people living in this highly polluted coal-producing region. As in his work in the civil rights movement and the Texas prisons, Lyon’s photographs from his travels are examples of his advocacy journalism, part of his effort to “Change history and preserve humanity”.
Info: Organized by Julian Cox, Installation overview: Elisabeth Sussman and Sondra Gilman, Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St, New York, Duration: 17/6-25/9/16, Days & Hours: June & September: Mon, Wed-Thu & Sun: 10:30-18:00, Fri-Sat 10:30-22:00, July & August: Mon-Thu & Sun: 10:30-18:00, Fri-Sat 10:30-22:00, http://whitney.org
