Danny Lyon

This picaresque memoir dives into the heart of the revolutionary 20th century through the lens of one of its most crucial witnesses, American photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon. His story begins in the Czar-ruled Russia of 1905, when Lyon’s uncle Abram fled to Brooklyn after his involvement in the murder of a policeman during a pogrom. A few decades later, amid the upheaval of World War II, Lyon was born.
Presaged by this beginning, Lyon’s life has overseen adventures and tragedies of world-historical proportions. This Is My Life I’m Talking About recounts them in generous detail, from Lyon’s friendship with the great American civil rights hero John Lewis—who is best known for his chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—to his involvement with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, upon which his famous photojournalist work The Bikeriders (1968) was based. Throughout, Lyon writes with tremendous feeling and humor, and his text is accompanied by a selection of unpublished and unseen photographs.
An early exponent of New Journalism, Danny Lyon (born 1942) is one of the most influential documentary photographers of the last six decades. While still a student at the University of Chicago, he was jailed in the South and became the first staff photographer of the SNCC. He went on to publish the seminal photobooks The Bikeriders and Conversations with the Dead (1971), an interrogation of the Texas prison system. Later in life, he pivoted to filmmaking, partnering with Robert Frank.

“From the beginning, even before he left the University of Chicago and headed south to take up a position as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Danny Lyon dreamed of being an artist in language as well as in pictures,” writes Randy Kennedy in the introduction to American Blood. In 1961, at the age of 19, for example, Lyon penned a brutally satirical article for a student mimeo magazine in which he argued for the deterrent power of prime-time televised executions (“the show would open, no doubt, like a baseball game, with a rendition of the National Anthem”).

Lyon is widely celebrated for his groundbreaking work in photography and film. Less recognized is the extensive body of writing that has broadened and reinforced his reach, in both the pages of his own publications and in others as varied as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, Aperture, civil rights publications, underground magazines and Lyon's blog.

This 400-page volume spans republished and previously unpublished texts from nearly six decades of his career, comprising a vast, meticulously archived history of American social change. Also included are conversations between Lyon and Hugh Edwards, Nan Goldin and Susan Meiselas. As Kennedy writes, Lyon’s collected writings, “remarkable as both artistic and moral models, remain far too little known, especially for an author who has seen what he has seen and possesses the rare ability to write about it as he speaks; Lyon is a world-class talker, funny, wise, sanguine and indefatigable.”

Danny Lyon (born 1942) is one of the most influential documentary photographers of the last five decades. His many books include The Movement (1964), The Bikeriders, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), Knave of Hearts (1999), Like a Thief’s Dream (2007) and Deep Sea Diver (2011).

In the summer of 1962, photographer Danny Lyon packed a Nikon Reflex and an old Leica in an army bag and hitchhiked south. Within a week he was in jail in Albany, Georgia, looking through the bars at another prisoner: Martin Luther King Jr. Lyon soon became the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which already had a reputation as one of the most committed and confrontational groups fighting for civil rights. Lyon traveled with the SNCC from Mississippi to Georgia to Tennessee to Alabama, as well as to the 1963 March on Washington. More than just his photographs, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, updated by Twin Palms in 2010, contains Lyon’s archive of press releases, speeches, flyers, personal recollections and even facsimiles of the typed notes he took while working with the SNCC. Introduced by Julian Bond, former member of the Georgia State Senate, and with an essay by the late congressman John Lewis, this visual memoir relates the firsthand experience of a witness to one of the greatest activist movements in American history.
Danny Lyon (born 1942) was born in New York and studied history and philosophy at the University of Chicago. While a student there he met one of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders, John Lewis. He served as chief photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and documented nearly every major event of the Civil Rights Movement. In Lyon’s later career, he produced several acclaimed photographic series on motorcyclists and prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections. He has received two Guggenheim fellowships and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 2022.
John Lewis (1940–2020) became involved in the Civil Rights movement when he was still a teenager. He was introduced to both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and participated in the 1960 Nashville sit-ins as well as the 1961 Freedom Rides. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966, he was one of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders who coordinated the March on Washington. He represented Georgia’s 5th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 until his death in 2020.
Julian Bond (1940-2015) co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. Bolstered by the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Bond ran for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives. He served until 1975, when he was then elected to the Georgia State Senate. From 1998 to 2010 he was the Chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).