Danny Lyon – Message To The Future

(A longer review of the great political photographer Danny Lyon's photo show at San Francisco's De Young Museum is available on the Stansbury Forum.)

I met Danny Lyon in 1963 in Ruleville, Mississippi. I was on the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) visiting the Delta town in Sunflower County (home of Sen. James O. Eastland, one of the most notorious racists of the period) with Bob Moses, SNCC’s Mississippi Project Director and Martha Prescod, a young African-American University of Michigan student volunteer who was there for the summer. Danny took a picture of us talking with a local woman sitting on her porch. The picture became well-known because it was used on the cover of a widely distributed SNCC flyer. The story it told was that we were trying to convince the woman to register to vote. But Martha recently reminded me that we were asking directions!

From those beginning photographer days, Lyon went on to become one of the major photographers of the civil rights move-ment, and then on to 50 years of using photography to tell the stories of the marginalized, discriminated against and left-out, as well as other important subjects. Along the way, he branched out to make 16mm documentaries and videos. All these are now on display at San Francisco’s De Young Museum, having come here from the new Whitney in New York’s West Village. 

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“Arrest of Taylor Washington, Atlanta,” 1963. Collection of the artist, L64 © Danny Lyon, courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

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“You put a camera in my hand, I want to get close to people.
​Not just physically close, but emotionally close, all of it.”  – Danny Lyon

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“Clifford Vaughs, another SNCC photographer, is arrested by the National Guard,
Cambridge, Maryland,” 1964. Collection of the Corcoran/National Gallery of Art,
​CGA1994.3.3 © Danny Lyon, courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

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Of his civil rights movement photos, Julian Bond said, “They put faces on the movement, put courage in the fearful, shone light on darkness, and helped to make the movement move.” Lyons was one of a number of photographers assembled by SNCC Executive Director Jim Forman to be chroniclers of The Movement (we always capitalized the letters “T” and “M”); he and Matt Heron are the best known of them.