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# Danny Lyon Lived His Photography
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/danny-lyon-lived-his-photography/
- Published: 2024-10-14T20:02:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T15:04:12.000Z
- Description: The photographer's autobiography takes us on a long voyage from East to West and back again without smoothing over the potholes in the road.
- Author: Julia Curl
- Tags: Books, Biography, Danny Lyon, Photography, Review, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-large, #Import 2025-11-24 09:36 (2023, 2024, part 2)

Danny Lyon’s new autobiography, [*This Is My Life I’m Talking About*](https://bookshop.org/a/539/9788862088091?ref=hyperallergic.com), takes us on a long voyage from East to West and back again without smoothing over any of the potholes in the road. As the son of European Jewish immigrants (his mother from Russia, his father from Germany), Lyon’s story begins before he was born, with the pogroms that his relatives only narrowly survived. Photography thus became a way for him to process painful realities and to speak out against them. Describing an early experience photographing the Dachau concentration camp 12 years after its liberation, he writes, “I was looking through a lens and a prism at a horror, and I was making something.” Throughout Lyon’s warts-and-all retelling of his life — which includes the bloody early days of the American Civil Rights Movement, his time on the road with a biker gang, and his project of photographing Texas prisons from the inside — he provides insight into his development and methods as an artist.

Through the artist’s eyes, these pivotal scenes in American history don’t blur into myth or nostalgia. Perhaps this is due partly to how the story is told. Lyon presents his heroes and closest friends, like the civil rights icon John Lewis and the photographer Robert Frank, without hagiography. The narrative has a spoken-word quality, as if your cool Jewish grandpa were recounting his wild past. Lyon’s train of thought veers in unexpected directions, with non sequiturs and figures who are introduced in one sentence only to meet a grisly death in the next. The book also contains surprising revelations, like the fact that his father was the eye doctor of the famed American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, or that Lyon attended protests at the University of Chicago alongside Bernie Sanders. (Lyon felt that they were “just playing” in Chicago and that “the real action was in the South.”)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2024/10/danny_lyon_father_collage.jpg)

"When my father died in 1977, I made this montage of his life using the pictures he had made and collected. I wept as I made it. In it, Dr. Ernst F. Lyon is pictured in his childhood in Germany, and crossing the Atlantic. It also includes a self-portrait Ernst made with his aunt Frida and her husband, Alfred; both were arrested in Cologne and sent to Theresienstadt, where they took their own lives. Ernst is also pictured in New York City at the beach with Beba on his shoulders, and before his death, holding hands with my oldest child, Gabrielle." From *This Is My Life I’m Talking About* by Danny Lyon, Damiani Books, 2024 (© Danny Lyon)

Broader historical meanings emerge through the details of Lyon’s life, such as the [Jewish role in the fight for racial equality](https://www.justice.gov/opa/blog/justice-department-recognizes-jewish-american-heritage-month?ref=hyperallergic.com) in the United States, the rise of the carceral state post-Jim Crow, and the rapid [gentrification of lower Manhattan](https://hyperallergic.com/611624/danny-lyon-destruction-of-lower-manhattan/). As the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a central organization in the Civil Rights Movement led by Black college students, Lyon faced arrest and death threats from police officers as he documented the brutality of racism in the South. Later, he infiltrated a Texas prison and captured its forced labor practices, photographing inmates picking cotton in the fields. While these events constitute an impressive life story, Lyon does not shy from self-critique. He reckons with letters from the 1960s that he sent to a biker friend in prison in which he seems “more interested in photography than I am in the movement,” resisting the simplicity of a heroic narrative. 

Lyon was an important figure in the rise of [New Journalism](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/on-being-the-ideal-reader-of-tom-wolfes-school-of-new-journalism?ref=hyperallergic.com), which combined the immersive methods of investigative reporting with the author’s distinct perspective and voice. His autobiography shows this in action. Rather than aspiring to detached objectivity, Danny Lyon truly *lived* what he shot, wielding the camera as both a shield and a weapon.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2024/10/danny_lyon_john_lewis.jpg)

"SNCC Chairman John Lewis speaking in Mississippi, 1963\. At that time I shared an apartment in Atlanta with John and Sam Shirah." From *This Is My Life I’m Talking About* by Danny Lyon, Damiani Books, 2024 (© Photograph Danny Lyon)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2024/10/danny_lyon_cal_with_little_barbara.jpg)

"Cal, born in Canada as Arthur Dion, riding with Little Barbara. Cal, a former Hells Angel from San Bernardino, is my best friend in the Outlaws. In my Hyde Park apartment, he narrated many of the stories that became the text of the book. In the film Cal is played by Boyd Holbrook. A housepainter, Cal fell off a ladder and died in the 1980s." From *This Is My Life I’m Talking About* by Danny Lyon, Damiani Books, 2024 (© Photograph Danny Lyon)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2024/10/danny_lyon_mark_di_suvero_and_i.jpg)

"Mark di Suvero and I while I was working on The Bikeriders, Hyde Park, Chicago, 1965." From *This Is My Life I’m Talking About* by Danny Lyon, Damiani Books, 2024 (© Photograph Danny Lyon)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2024/10/danny_lyon_outside_the_clubhouse.jpg)

"Outside the clubhouse of the Chicago Outlaws, a woman on a Harley." From *This Is My Life I’m Talking About* by Danny Lyon, Damiani Books, 2024 (© Photograph Danny Lyon)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2024/10/danny_lyon_benny_bauer_real.jpg)

"The real Benny Bauer, the nineteen year old Chicago Outlaw that Kathy married." From *This Is My Life I’m Talking About* by Danny Lyon, Damiani Books, 2024 (© Photograph Danny Lyon)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2024/10/danny_lyon_susan_meiselas_nancy_weiss.jpg)

"Susan Meiselas and Nancy Weiss Lyon with Che the six-toed cat, Llanito, New Mexico, 1979." From *This Is My Life I’m Talking About* by Danny Lyon, Damiani Books, 2024 (© Photograph Danny Lyon)

[This Is My Life I’m Talking About](https://bookshop.org/a/539/9788862088091?ref=hyperallergic.com) *by Danny Lyon (2024) is published by Damiani Books and is available online and in bookstores.*