Danny Lyon

American, born 1942

BiographyDanny Lyon (American, born 1942) is one of the most important American photographers of the last half century to renew the documentary tradition's concern with social justice. He was shaped by his experience covering the unrest of the 1960s as staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. This led to his first publication, The Movement (1964), and since then he has produced numerous books, including Conversations with the Dead (1971), the first book on America's prison system by a photojournalist. He has also had a significant career as a filmmaker, his work including Little Boy (1977), Los Niños Abandonados (1975), and Social Sciences 127 (1969). His work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, American Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, the J. Paul Getty Museum and many other public institutions.

In the late 1960s Lyon turned his camera on the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan, where the construction of the World Trade Center, among other projects, cleared away much of the area's nineteenth century building stock (The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, 1969; reissued by powerHouse, 2005). “I came to see the buildings as fossils of a time past,” wrote Lyon. “For a hundred years they have stood in the darkness and the day. . . . Now, in the end, they are visited by demolition men . . . pulling apart brick by brick and beam by beam the work of other American workers who once stood on the same walls and held the same bricks, then new, so long ago.” Lyon’s documentary series became the model for visual work addressing the aging infrastructure of American cities, now sometimes called ruin porn, and the perils of the 1960s policy of urban renewal through demolition.

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