AN EMPATHETIC EYE: Photographer Danny Lyon captures the heroic in the everyday with his lens.
Photographer Danny Lyon captures the heroic in the everyday with his lens
“When we act, when we publish, when we break a law that is unjust, when we act politically, we empower ourselves.”
From portraits of motorcyclists to civil rights protesters to Bernalillo families beneath the lights of the State Fair, Danny Lyon’s lens emerges from a place of empathy.
A pioneering artist who was part of the New Journalism, where the photographer becomes embedded in the story, Lyon’s work captures the heroic in the everyday.
The Albuquerque Museum is showing “Journey West: Danny Lyon,” a mosaic of the photographer’s work from the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club to Texas prisons, the Civil Rights Movement and his New Mexico home. The exhibition features more than 175 photographs, films and montages spanning his 60-year career.
Although Lyon is perhaps most famous for his shots of motorcyclists, his reach is national, said museum curator Josie Lopez.
“When you first think about him, you realize he has captured some very important historical moments,” she said.
As the official photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lyon created iconic images of civil rights protests and the 1963 March on Washington. In 1967, he was arrested along with the author Norman Mailer and others at the March on the Pentagon. In 1970, he caught Muhammad Ali sitting in a car watching a protest.
“He ends up becoming good friends with (the late representative and Civil Rights activist) John Lewis,” Lopez said.
“He joins a motorcycle club and these become some of his most famous photographs,” she added.
In Texas, Lyon embedded himself in the state’s penitentiary system for 14 months, the images giving its prisoners a dignified presence as they endured harsh conditions.
As a photographer whose work has hung in New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and San Francisco’s de Young Museum, as well as institutions in Houston, Spain and Germany, Lyon’s New Mexico work is often overlooked. Lopez decided to upend that trend and feature his portraits of the state’s inhabitants and its landscapes.
“He really wants people to understand that his artwork is all about empathy,” she said.
The images, stories, and perspectives represented feature people taking action. Sometimes the acts are heroic deeds by great men and women, and sometimes they are quiet acts of everyday survival and the quintessentially human struggle to be free.
His pictures resonate both specifically and universally. They tell intimate stories of everyday people with the sensitivity of an insider.
Born in Queens, New York, Lyon came to Llanito, a village near Bernalillo and Santa Ana Pueblo in 1970. He began building an adobe house on two acres of irrigated land, asking for advice from his neighbors. Through his connections from the Civil Rights Movement, he met Ezequiel Dominguez, who introduced him to Eddie, an undocumented worker from Namiquipa, Chihuahua. Over the years, Eddie and Danny built the home where the artist lives today.
His 1975 portrait of Johnnie Sanchez at the State Fair is compelling in its perspective. His face beams the shining hope of youth.
“Danny is shooting it from a low angle,” Lopez said. “So it creates this statuesque figure in front of this giant Ferris wheel.”
In “Navajo Pool Room,” the geometric interplay of the Gallup space creates drama through the lines in the pool cues and tables.
“He is always anticipating where the subject is going to be,” Lopez said. “The cue ball is in the center of the composition.”
One of Lyon’s most famous images, “(The Boy with Puppy) Knoxville” was made during a trip to visit the Tennessee home of novelist and critic James Agee.
The image shows a teenager cradling a puppy while he and his companion work on their stalled car.
“It’s this really interesting look at class,” Lopez said. “The diversity of people in the exhibition is pretty amazing. It documents his life journey.”
Lyon’s motorcycle film and photographs are about to be produced as a major film, she added.
“He is asking, ‘Who is the hero?’ ” Lopez said. “For him, it’s the people who do the work.”
Danny Lyon