Danny Lyon

b. 1942, Brooklyn, New York

Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn in 1942 and grew up in Queens. He bought his first camera during a summer trip in Germany before starting at the University of Chicago. Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, he hitchhiked Route 66 during the summer of 1962. He became the first photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and attended most major civil rights events, becoming friends with John Lewis. In 1964, he spent two years with the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, which resulted in the acclaimed book The Bikeriders (Macmillan, 1968; Aperture, 2014). In 1967, he moved to Texas to document the penitentiary system and published Conversations with the Dead (Henry Holt and Co., 1971; Phaidon, 2015). After Texas he moved to New York and lived with the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. They formed a company, Sweeney Films. Lyon moved to New Mexico in 1970 and then to upstate New York in 1987. He currently lives and works in New York City and New Mexico.

In 2016, a major retrospective exhibition, Danny Lyon: Message to the Future, was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Franciso and premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City before traveling to San Francisco. Lyon’s photographs are in museums and collections throughout the world including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Lyon has won numerous awards including Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1978), a Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, and the Lucie Award.