In a penal system that legalises slavery, who is the real criminal? That question lies at the heart of Danny Lyon’s landmark 1971 monograph, Conversations with the Dead, a masterwork of New Journalism chronicling crime and punishment in the United States. After his work in the Civil Rights Movement and with the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club, Lyon gained unprecedented access to seven penitentiaries inside the Texas Department of Corrections over 14 months in 1967-68 to create a Dostoyevskian journey into the belly of the beast.
A new exhibition, Danny Lyon: The Texas Prison Photographs at Howard Greenberg in New York, revisits this seminal collection of photographs, film, drawings, and ephemera, making for an unflinching look at America’s notorious prison industrial complex. Nearly 60 years later, the work is only more resonant, tracing the long arc of America’s original sin through the lives of the condemned.
