Danny Lyon's new autobiography, It's my life I'm talking abouttakes us on a long journey from east to west and back without smooth on any of the nests on the road. As the son of European Jewish immigrants (his mother of Russia, his father from Germany), the history of Lyon begins before his birth, with the pogroms that his relatives only have survived. Photography has therefore become a way for him to deal with painful realities and denounce them. Describing a first experience in photography The Dachau concentration camp 12 years after his release, he wrote: “I looked through a goal and a prism to horror, and I was doing something.” Throughout the story of the warts of Lyon and his life – which includes the first bloody days of the American Civil Rights movement, his time on the road with a biker gang, and his project to photograph Texas prisons from the inside – he gives an overview of his development and his methods as an artist.
Through the artist's eyes, these pivotal scenes in American history do not blur in myth or nostalgia. This may be due in part to the way the story is told. Lyon presents his closest heroes and friends, such as the icon of civil rights John Lewis and the photographer Robert Frank, without hagiography. The story has a spoken quality, as if your cool Jewish grandfather told its wild past. Lyon's thought of thinking turns into unexpected directions, with non -sequential and characters who are introduced into a single sentence to respect a macabre death in the next. The book also contains surprising revelations, such as the fact that his father was the doctoral student of the famous American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, or that Lyon attended demonstrations at the University of Chicago alongside Bernie Sanders. (Lyon considered that they “played” in Chicago and that “real action was in the south”))
Wider historical meanings emerge through the details of the life of Lyon, such as the Jewish role in the struggle for racial equality In the United States, the rise in the prison post-Jim Corbeau and the rapid Gentrification of the lower Manhattan. As the first staff photographer of the non-violent coordination committee of students (SNCC), a central organization of the civil rights movement led by students of the black college, Lyon faced threats of arrest and the death of the police as it document the brutality of racism in the South. Later, he infiltrated a Texas prison and captured his forced work practices, photographing prisoners picking cotton in the fields. Although these events are an impressive life story, Lyon does not hesitate to self -criticism. He estimated with letters from the 1960s that he sent to a biker friend in prison in which he seems “more interested in photography than in the movement”, resists the simplicity of a heroic story.
Lyon was an important figure in the climb New journalismwhich combined the immersive investigative reporting methods with the author's perspective and voice of the author. His autobiography shows it in action. Rather than sucking on detached objectivity, Danny Lyon lived What he pulled, brandishing the camera like a shield and a weapon.
From It's my life I'm talking about By Danny Lyon, Damiani Books, 2024 (© Photograph Danny Lyon)
It's my life I'm talking about By Danny Lyon (2024) is published by Damiani Books and is available online and in bookstores.
