“I think Billy McCune is the same as me. We are, in every measure that I can imagine, equal, and what he has suffered, I must imagine, for even a moment, as my suffering.” Deeply personal statements like this about the inmate befriended by Danny Lyon in the Texas jails suffuse Julian Cox’s essay about the Bronx-born photographer, the subject of a historic exhibit at the de Young Museum.

Working in collaboration with Elisabeth Suffman of the Whitney, where it made its debut, Cox spent several years researching archives and visiting Danny and his wife Nancy in their New Mexico home. In 1962, at age 20, Lyon hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois to chronicle nonviolent demonstrators protesting a segregated swimming pool. He embedded in the Texas prison system before journalists embedded and photographed miners in rural China when everyone else was flocking to the business centers in Beijing. His family and New Mexico neighbors are lovingly montaged in personal collections he has made for years. I looked through the exhibit catalog with curator Julian Cox and learned more about this artist and citizen.

Read this interview and more in the November 2016 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine.

Gwynned Vitello: To be honest, I’m surprised that many people are not familiar with Danny, but promoting himself doesn’t seem to be much of a priority. He didn’t want to be part of the establishment, so I wonder if this is important to him.
Julian Cox: That’s an interesting observation, off the top, of him. He’s always been on the fringes of the art world, and has taken great pride in being an independent voice and staying true to his vision and his goals. This is the first major lifetime retrospective. There was a mid-career assessment in 1991 organized by a German woman called Ute Eskildsen, a show that traveled from Europe and then to different venues in the US, but didn’t go to New York City or the West Coast. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to do this project, to breathe new life into the entire arc of his career, these great bodies of work that he produced in the ’60s, and flesh them out with the important work from the ’70s onward.

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Stephanie. Sandoval County, N.M. 1970.

I know that a lot of the work involves his films, and I’d like to know more about them.
It is very relevant because it’s another way of dealing with his ideas and how he approached his subjects, starting with Bill Sanders, the tattoo artist he got to meet through his work in the prison system. He was introduced to Bill by one of the prisoners, a guy called “James Ray” Jimmy Renton who told Danny that Sanders “has tattooed many of the prisoners who are in this Texas prison system.” Danny went to meet with Bill and was absolutely bowled over by this guy’s personality and realized he would make a great subject for a film.

What was Danny’s intention when he said that he wanted “to put into a movie how I see him, not as he is, and certainly not as he sees himself.”
What that means is that Danny sees in this guy the potential to be a character, a protagonist. He really becomes a voice for something much larger—a voice for the undereducated. He behaves like an idiot savant. He is talking to clients about the Vietnam war in a very powerful, purposeful way, but also talking about gender roles and same-sex relationships in a very off-the-cuff, slightly irreverent way. He becomes a mouthpiece that represents a whole perspective of American culture in that time toward the war in Vietnam and how we define ourselves through sexuality. Danny identified these elements by spending time with this person, and then finds a way, through the medium of film, to express that. As a director, he has choreographed the film and edited it to draw attention to this guy’s idiosyncratic world view, and it was 1969, his first film.

And what a clever way to present him in the film, like, why is this guy wearing a suit and tie?
At the beginning, you see him teaching a class, and that’s why the film is called Soc. Sci. It’s like a social sciences class. The suit and tie is kind of a deceit, if you like, of the movie, at the very beginning where he looks like a conventional lecturer in this scene set up by Danny, where he’s teaching a class about the history of the tattoo and the idea of writing on your body with this implement. Then you jump into this crazy color footage of a guy progressively getting more drunk and kind of sounding off with his clients.

One of the things that’s interesting about the film, and a thread that runs through Lyon’s work, is this notion of finding reality and responding to it in a certain way that provides a very clear sense of your view of the world. Danny comes out of a photojournalistic tradition in that way. It’s not just one way of making a picture or describing a community, but is quite layered and quite intense.

Something he expanded on with his project at the Texas Department of Corrections?
He was in and out of the Texas prisons for more than twelve months working in that environment, and he realized early on that the still photograph didn’t feel sufficient to really capture what he needed to say about the environment. To be able to film it would be very important, so he did. The exhibition features silent 16mm film footage that he made in the Texas prisons that’s never been seen before and relates very closely to some of the very iconic pictures taken there. For example, there’s an amazing film sequence of the guys hanging out on the weekend recess in the jails, where they’re just patiently recreating or playing dominoes, one scene especially where you see them kind of flipping the dominoes and smoking. The way he sees this prison environment is very filmic and has a close relationship to the films of someone like Kenneth Anger, with a definite homo-erotic element, that sort of focus on the male body.

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Shakedown at Ellis Unit, Texas, 1968.

I guess when he strictly took photos, he felt he wanted to add more and needed to expand on the subject.
That’s part of it, but also the notion in a lot of the projects, say the bikers or in the prisons, it’s about the accumulations of images that relate to a specific theme. One of the things film allows is to sequence imagery in a new and different kind of way, and of course, edited in one’s own unique way. It’s different from the way you edit still photographs, and I think that was a challenge that really interested Danny—an additional, more expansive way of telling stories. That is at the very heart of what Danny is trying to do, to make a record of his time in the moment with issues that are of grave concern to him as an engaged member of society—civil rights, immigration, and the prison system. These big themes are very present in his work and have had a hold on him for a lifetime.

When he worked with the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), he operated with guidelines and structure that would help later on in his filmmaking.
His very earliest work in Cairo, Illinois was him really following his instinct and deciding to go there and see what was happening. That’s where he met John Lewis, who has become a lifelong, very dear friend. It was Lewis who said, “Danny, if you want to get involved, you should come down South, and you can really get involved there.” That was the trigger for him to leave his studies for the time being. You couldn’t make a picture any more effective than he did to communicate the philosophy of nonviolent, social direct action.

Danny was meant to cover certain stories. He would tell you that he really cut his teeth as a young artist involved in the movement because it was high intensity, high emotion and commitment. Danny was there when Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963, on the mall in Washington. His amazing picture, with the negative space making it a perfect poster, became an important icon of the SNCC movement. When you turn the page in the Message to the Future catalogue, you get to the self-portrait, and you see his activism, where he’s doing a job, doing it for himself, but for larger reasons.

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Clifford Vaughs, another photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, being arrested by the National Guard. Cambridge, Md. 1964.

Knowing that, I don’t understand him saying that when he walked away from the Civil Rights Movement, he “didn’t look back?”
The fact of the matter is that in 1964, when he did pull away from the movement, he’s still a very young man, don’t forget, 22 years of age. Even then, he was very, very conscious of his desire to grow as an artist, to challenge himself to learn new things. That was foremost. He wanted to make new kinds of pictures. It’s clear in letters from that period, but also important that this is 1964, that Freedom Summer where there is a flood of activists of all kinds, where filmmakers and photographers are going to the South and organizing. He did not want to be part of a club or group. He said, “They are all arriving. It’s time for me to go.”

When he goes back to Chicago, he takes these beautiful portraits where he’s trying to make a different kind of picture. Without being present in the civil rights turmoil, he tries to make a lasting portrait of an individual, in this case with his still, handheld 35mm camera, and then a two and a quarter camera. Here we see a different kind of photographer who is almost creating a studio portrait within the street. As graceful as Irving Penn, he has the same sort of reverence and respect for his subjects, but his interests are artistically different, presenting a totally different side of who he is as a person and an artist.

Although not an art major at the University of Chicago, Danny was mentored by Hugh Edwards, Curator of Prints and Drawing at the Art Institute, who was also self taught. Describe their relationship.

Edwards is the person who lends Danny his two and a quarter camera and says, “You should really try making a picture with this, see how it pushes you in a new direction.” This work shows a young artist flexing his muscles and really expanding with a totally different kind of subject.

The Chicago Motorcycle Club was an entirely new focus, one that fed his appetite for adventure. How did this come about?
He had a classmate at the University of Chicago who was a motorcyclist, a Scrambler, as they called them, who would go off to do these off-road races, and Danny loved attending them. He started thinking about connecting himself with this biker gang and became integrated with them, going on bike rides, photographing them extensively, and making audio recordings. There was a living-in-the-fast-lane aspect to this, but again, it was about finding a new subject and a new way of making pictures. From his own bike, just in parallel, shooting literally on the fly, all the elements are in perfect harmony as he captures this guy’s head between the pillars of the bridge and the hair streaming. It’s one of those perfect shots. And he was not just making a picture out of nowhere. He’d been thinking about it for a considerable amount of time, and he nailed it.

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Maricopa County, Arizona, 1977

The Destruction of Manhattan, where he chronicles the razing of neighborhoods to make way for the first World Trade Center, seems like a detour from his human-centered subjects.
An important way to think of this is the fact that Danny is a New Yorker and a very passionate student of history. He loves American history and was in and out of New York at that time. His project about the architectural transformation of lower Manhattan is an important set of pictures, and again, a new way of working. With a 4x5 camera mounted on a tripod, it’s a much slower way of working, much more deliberate and exacting, independent and solitary. But Danny can’t live without contact with people, and he befriended many workers who allowed him access to buildings that would have been otherwise off limits.

Subsequent photo journeys brought him to rural China and Haiti, as well as much of South America, and now he’s settled in New Mexico where he lives in the adobe house he built himself.
We try to convey his rootedness in New Mexico through his relationship with people like Eddie Rivera, an undocumented worker who comes across the border every spring. Danny takes care of him, pays him, and he goes back and returns again. Danny has really connected with the Latino and Native American communities, and that, really, is the catalyst for him to explore the Americas in a much broader way. One of Danny’s movies, Willy, is a focus of the exhibition. It’s about this young guy who has some mental illness problems and gets involved in some petty crime. He goes in and out of the judicial system and ends up, not just a victim, but another statistic of the poor and disenfranchised who don’t have access to physical and mental health care.

The notion of commitment to the subject is really the biggest thread in Danny’s work. It’s the formula he has followed his entire life: you have to be committed to the subject and what you’re doing with your time for it to make a difference.

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Originally published in the November issue of Juxtapoz Magazine, on newsstands worldwide and in our web store.