Photo: Danny Lyon. From Lindsey’s room, Louisville, 1966. ©Danny Lyon/Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.
Brooklyn native Danny Lyon came of age in the 1960s as the nation underwent radical upheavals that have defined the era in which we live. As the Civil Rights Movement came to the fore, Lyon headed south to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1962 at the age of 20. His time with SNCC put him on the frontlines of the movement, where he was able to document the horrific reality the fight against government-sanctioned apartheid.
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“It was my good fortune to stumble into the story early,” Lyon told The Guardian in 2012. “Being in SNCC politicized me. Having said that, I wasn’t black and I was free. My agenda was photography and books, and what is now called media.”
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Lyon is one of the first photographers to practice New Journalism, to embed himself within the cultures he was documenting in order to tell the story from the inside. At the same time, the camera defined his role: he was a journalist using photography to question the practices of the government, the media, and society as a whole.
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