Look Inside
Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
Unlike the 2005 revised edition, this 2020 reprint is a facsimile reprint of the original 1969 book.
In 1967, Danny Lyon turned his camera toward life in American prisons. Conversations with the Dead reflects fourteen months he spent looking and listening inside six Texas penitentiaries. Free to enter the prisons at any time of day or night, Lyon moved among the prisoners as they functioned in groups, and as they existed in isolation. He photographed men in their cells, in the fields, working, eating, daydreaming - passing so much time. Befriending them, he records the personal testimonies of their lives and the official documents which condemn them to living death. In the course of his unprecedented journey through the Texas prisons, Lyon met Billy McCune. A forty-two, McCune had already served eighteen years of a life sentence. He is a monument to the human spirit : a survivor of wretchedness unbounded ; a victor over despair so great that he castrated himself. Billy McCune's paintings and writings reveal a compassionate consciousness which confounds the "justice" which brands him "criminal."
"I've tried with whatever power I had to make this picture of imprisonment as distressing as it is in reality. The few times I doubted the wisdom of my attitude, I had only to visit someone in his cell to straighten out my mind. I had been warned at the outset not to let the men con me. I am told that I have not seen what these men have done on the outside. That is true. I saw only what was before my eyes. And the material collected here doesn't approach for a moment the feeling you get standing for two minutes in the corridor of Ellis."
Danny Lyon’s "The Destruction of Lower Manhattan" , initially published in 1969, serves as a visual eulogy, documenting the demolition of 60 acres of historic, nineteenth-century buildings below Canal Street in New York. Through black-and-white photography, the book captures both the abandoned interiors and the destruction process, highlighting the human and architectural cost of urban renewal projects that predated the World Trade Center.
This is the first revised edition of this iconic book.
In 1967, Danny Lyon turned his camera toward life in American prisons. Conversations with the Dead reflects fourteen months he spent looking and listening inside six Texas penitentiaries. Free to enter the prisons at any time of day or night, Lyon moved among the prisoners as they functioned in groups, and as they existed in isolation. He photographed men in their cells, in the fields, working, eating, daydreaming - passing so much time. Befriending them, he records the personal testimonies of their lives and the official documents which condemn them to living death. In the course of his unprecedented journey through the Texas prisons, Lyon met Billy McCune. A forty-two, McCune had already served eighteen years of a life sentence. He is a monument to the human spirit : a survivor of wretchedness unbounded ; a victor over despair so great that he castrated himself. Billy McCune's paintings and writings reveal a compassionate consciousness which confounds the "justice" which brands him "criminal."
"I've tried with whatever power I had to make this picture of imprisonment as distressing as it is in reality. The few times I doubted the wisdom of my attitude, I had only to visit someone in his cell to straighten out my mind. I had been warned at the outset not to let the men con me. I am told that I have not seen what these men have done on the outside. That is true. I saw only what was before my eyes. And the material collected here doesn't approach for a moment the feeling you get standing for two minutes in the corridor of Ellis."
This is the 2015 Phaidon reprint of the 1971 book.
A visual history of rebellion and resistance from the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) under Czarist Russia, Jewish immigration from the Pale to America, the Civil Rights Movement, and the 1960’s anti-war movement, all culminating in inspiring thoughts on surviving the present tyranny.The Rebel’s Scrapbook traces a single, interwoven lineage of dissent across more than a century, built out of the Lyon family archive, political ephemera, and Lyon’s photographs. Part memoir, part historical collage, it assembles memory and history into a visual record of revolt and the human impulse to resist tyranny — inherited and carried forward image after image, generation by generation.
%20Resized.webp)
Danny Lyon, American, b. 1942
Lyon considers himself a photojournalist, and his work, a brand of advocacy journalism; Lyon devotes his career to documenting the demonstrations of social activism in which he has immersed himself. A self-taught photographer, Lyon was first introduced to the medium as a staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, photographing civil rights demonstrations against segregation in the American South. His other subjects have included the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club (of which he was part for two years), the Texas prison system and the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan. His work was perhaps most strongly influenced by the 1941 publication Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, featuring text by James Agee and photographs by Walker Evans.
This is the facsimile reproduction of the 1968 first edition.