Pictures from the New World

Danny Lyon
Pictures from the New World

Photographs: Danny Lyon

Text: Danny Lyon

Publisher: Aperture

144 pages

Year: 1981

ISBN: 0-89381-108-4

Price: 45 €

Comments: Softcover, 22,8 x 29,1 cm, b&w and color photographs. First edition. In very good condition.

What is America? In 1962 a young New Yorker named Danny Lyon decided to find out. He began a journey of discovery, both as witness and committed participant, that was to last over eighteen years, taking him from the civil rights movement in the South to a Chicago motorcycle gang, to Texas prisons, to Latin America, and finally home to New York. For Lyon photography became a means of recording his commitment to and love for a continent, as well as a means of defending his own humanity against the deadly encroachments of a technological society. An unusual autobiography, Lyon's Pictures from the New World is perhaps the nearest pictorial equivalent to Walt Whitman's compendium of his roamings through a grand but divided America of a previous century, or to Jack Kerouac's record of his impassioned journey on the road of a previous generation.

Lyon's pictures crackle with involvement and engagement, but they also convey anxiety and an impulse to understand and to exorcize. Humanity is not just the subject, but the real substance of his art.

For the most part he photographs the estranged and dispossessed, the outcast and the outlaw, those who have escaped or have refused assimilation into the great melting pot of the middle class. Unlike the social realists, however, Lyon does not attempt to evoke pity. An intense and profound identification with his subjects gives Lyon's work a sense of loss, yearning, and despair, but beneath it something more: a deeply rooted faith in both life and art, experiences that to the photographer are identical.

Whether in his photographs of Colombian street urchins and brothels or in his portraits of prisoners, bikeriders, and transvestites, Lyon seems not only to be recording what he sees, but to be showing us something about ourselves: a raw but authentic beauty, a vitality, and, paradoxically, a freedom that has largely been lost in the contemporary world of landscaped freeways, tidy suburban homes, and all the other excesses of American affluence.

Lyon's latest pictures were made on the subways of New York, a few miles from where he grew up. In the end, after his years and miles of searching, he discovered the world of humanity and feeling flourishing on his own doorstep. For Lyon the sixties and seventies were the best of times because they were his times. His picture of America is a testimony to the diversity of human feeling in this country and this continent, ironically coming at a time when so many people seem to know so much and to feel so little.

Danny Lyon is a photographer and film maker. Born in New York City in 1942, he graduated with a degree in history from the University of Chicago. After winning a contest in 1962, he turned to photography. That same summer a speech by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairmaN John Lewis convinced him to join the civil rights movement. and he became SNCC's staff photographer. In 1967 he published The Bikeriders, an intimate look at the world and spirit of motorcyclists, and in 1971 Conversations with the Dead, a pictorial indictment of Texas prison life. His feature films include The Abandoned Children, Little Boy, and El Otro Lado. Lyon has received John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellowships in both photography and film making, and his photographs are represented in the collections of major museums throughout America and Europe.