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Danny Lyon
House in the Mississippi Delta, 1963, from "Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement," 1963/1997
Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches
Open edition, signed, verso
Unframed
Courtesy of Etherton Gallery
Estimated value: $7,000
In the summer of 1962, Danny Lyon, a twenty-year-old University of Chicago history student, packed his cameras in an army bag and hitch-hiked south. Within a week he was in jail in Albany, Georgia, looking through the bars at another prisoner, Martin Luther King, Jr. Lyon soon became the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and photographed the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, from 1962-1964.
As the late Julian Bond (1940-2015) said in his foreword to Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, “His (Lyon’s) SNCC-time is a snapshot of the organization that thought itself the radical wing of the nonviolent southern movement; the people, faces, and places seen here capture the heat and excitement and despair of those two hopeful years. From Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 1992)
About the Artist:
Danny Lyon
Born in 1942 and raised in Queens, New York, Lyon was shaped as an artist by the prose of Beat Generation writers and the photo scrapbooks of his immigrant father. He also was inspired by the unvarnished realism of photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee. With the support of early mentor Hugh Edwards, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, Lyon developed the restless, compassionate vision that marks his work in all media. Lyon’s photographs are held in public and private collections throughout the United States and internationally.
After moving from New York City in 1970, Lyon settled in New Mexico and has tackled a broad range of subjects in the Southwest and abroad: life with his family in the mixed Native American and Latino community Bernalillo (just north of Albuquerque); abandoned street children in Colombia; the political turmoil in Haiti; the chaos of life in the booming, polluted industrial outposts in China; and, most recently, the Occupy movement in New York, Los Angeles, and Oakland.
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