Danny Lyon
1963: Scenes of young African-American protestors applauding, one with his arm raised toward the sky; racial conflict and police brutality. Danny Lyon, the son of Jewish immigrants, was just twenty-one years old and a student at the University of Chicago when he fearlessly took these photographs of a protest that made history: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. These powerful images would establish the photographer and filmmaker as one of the most important chroniclers of the American civil rights movement.
Alongside these early images, Lyon also photographed the series Conversations with the Dead (1967/68), the first to reveal the daily lives of inmates and guards in Texan prisons. In the same year, his collection The Bikeriders (1966) was a haunting, first-hand and unsparing glimpse of life inside the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, well before the release of the American cult film Easy Rider (1969) popularized the energy, independence, freedom, and romance of highways and Harley-Davidson and brought them into the mainstream.
Throughout a career spanning over fifty years, Lyon took countless photographs documenting social reality and bearing unmistakable witness to the political battles of half a century—while also seamlessly fusing his photographic work with moving images and the written word. C/O Berlin is the only institution in Germany to showcase this comprehensive retrospective with approximately 175 works, including the photographer’s most important series from the late 1960s and 1970s, and offers a rare look at lesser-known films, collage works, and materials from Lyon’s private archive. The exhibition is curated by Julian Cox and organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Danny Lyon
was born in New York in 1942. His work as a photographer and filmmaker was influenced by the American Beat Generation, in particular by authors such as James Agee and by Walt Whitman’s verse. Lyon graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Chicago in 1963. He had already joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) one year previously, and from 1962 onward, he photographed the African-American civil rights movement. The work was first published in the book The Movement with a text by Lorraine Hansberry. His first solo publication, the series The Bikeriders (1966), is considered one of his most important works, alongside the series The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1967) and Conversations with the Dead (1967/68). In 1969, Lyon was awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for his photography, and received the same award for his lm work in 1979. His pieces have been exhibited at renowned institutions around the globe, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. Danny Lyon lives and works in New Mexico and New York City.