Danny Lyon: The Texas Prison Photographs

Howard Greenberg Gallery will present Danny Lyon: The Texas Prison Photographs from December 5, 2025 through January 31, 2026. A landmark depiction of incarceration, the exhibition features photographs, films, drawings, and ephemera from 1967-68. The Texas Prison Photographs marks acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon’s first show with Howard Greenberg Gallery following the announcement of the Gallery’s representation of Lyon in April 2025. The exhibition will open with a reception on December 5 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. with the artist in attendance.

Danny Lyon revolutionized documentary photography in the 1960s with his radical participatory approach, notably in the Civil Rights Movement and with the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club, which led to his book, The Bikeriders. His New Journalism style was rooted in involvement, as he explained: "I was a participant who also happened to be a photographer."

In 1967, Lyon gained unprecedented access to seven Texas penitentiaries for 14 months, aiming to record the reality of incarceration. He was free to enter the prisons at any time of the day or night, and photographed men in their cells, in the fields and factories where they worked, eating at the cafeteria, in isolation and during shakedowns. This resulted in raw, empathetic images of marginalized individuals, published in 1971 as the highly regarded photobook Conversations with the Dead. Known for his immersive approach, Lyon's style broke from traditional journalism by blending personal perspective with documentary storytelling. Revolutionary for its time, Conversations with the Dead was among the first photobooks to incorporate ephemera, setting a new standard in journalism and photography and influencing generations.

Presenting Lyon’s record of Texas prisons, the exhibition will showcase primarily vintage prints alongside select modern work and original artwork by the incarcerated, as well as drawings, letters, prison-related documents, audio interviews, and 16mm film footage. Taken as a whole, the exhibition offers not only a rare and intimate glimpse into life inside seven Texas penitentiaries in the late 1960s but highlights the relationships Lyon built with inmates. On view for the first time, the exhibition will also present unpublished pictures by Lyon from his visits to the Goree Unit, Texas’s women’s penitentiary.

As the copy on the back of the paperback edition of Conversations with the Dead noted, “This shattering portrait of oppression and futility must be recognized as a plea to American Society—the ultimate warden of all our prisons.”

“I kept wondering what the story was, what wasn’t in the papers yet, what I could discover and make public with my pictures,” Lyon has stated. “Texas would change my life.”

Concurrent with the exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery, Lyon’s films, including Willie (1985) and his films about undocumented Mexican workers, will be presented at Metrograph and the Roxy Cinema.

About Danny Lyon

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. In 1962 he hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois, to begin his record of the civil rights movement. He became the first photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and attended most major civil rights events, becoming friends and roommates with John Lewis. In 1965, he spent two years with the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, which resulted in the acclaimed book The Bikeriders (Macmillan, 1968; Twin Palms, 1997; Chronicle, 2003; Aperture, 2014). In 1967, he moved to Texas to work in 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, and Lyon turned his focus to non-fiction films. Lyon moved to New Mexico in 1970, then to upstate New York in 1987. In 2023 The Bikeriders was released as a major motion picture. His photography can be found in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Lyon is an active blogger at bleakbeauty.com; his IG is Dannylyonphotos2. He currently lives and works in New York City and New Mexico.