PHOTOGRAPHS
Lyon, Danny
U.S. (1942 - )
Truck Near Yuma, Arizona
1962
Gelatin silver print
9 x 13 1/4 in. (22.8 x 33.7 cm) image size; 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm) sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection
FA 2001.124

Danny Lyon is primarily a political photographer and filmmaker. Self-taught in photography, he shot for the Chicago Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, which lead to the publication of one of his most important books, The Movement. This image of a truck near Yuma, Arizona was taken early in Lyon’s career. Illustrating a private, rather desolate landscape, it eschews the more colorful characters for which his later work would be known.

Danny Lyon is the author of several photographic essays. His first book, The Movement was followed three years later by The Bikeriders, which looked at the outlaw lives of bikers. He has also published Conversations with the Dead, a photographic document of the lives of inmates in Texas in the late 1960s and I Like to Eat Right on the Dirt, a collection of Polaroids of his children. Lyon’s films include The Abandoned Children, Little Boy, and El Otro Lado (The Other Side). “Photographers traditionally have worked in silence, putting everything into the picture of that small area measured in inches that they have staked out. I have never done that, but have usually presented my photographs in books with a text. In the texts I have spoken through other people’s voices, sometimes out of respect for what they have had to say, and sometimes as a disguise for myself.” – Danny Lyon. -- Label copy for 150 Works of Art, October 1, 2005 to February 26, 2006.