Danny Lyon

Danny Lyon: Junk offers a stark yet deeply poetic journey through America’s forgotten landscapes, where once-proud automobiles rest in silence beneath open skies. In this new volume, Danny Lyon turns his lens toward the discarded machines of the mid-20th century—vehicles that once carried families, dreams and miles of stories—now weathered into relics scattered across the western states.

Known for his uncompromising documentary style, Lyon approaches these junkyards with the same empathy and curiosity that shaped his earlier landmarks, from The Bikeriders to The Destruction of Lower Manhattan. Here, however, the protagonists are not people but the ghosts of American mobility: ’53 Oldsmobiles, faded Chevrolets, sun-cracked Buicks. Their chrome has dulled, their paint has peeled, yet their presence remains unexpectedly grand. Lyon’s photographs evoke the quiet dignity of ruins—objects transformed by time into monuments of use, memory and loss.

The project draws on a personal thread. Lyon’s first real encounter with the power of the automobile came with the Oldsmobile passed down from his father, a car that carried him through the American South during the civil rights movement. Speeding along Georgia backroads, he understood both the freedom and fragility of life behind the wheel. That early awakening echoes in these images, where the vitality of movement lingers even in stillness.

Shot across Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma, the series reveals surprising regional variations: cars half-buried in prairie grasses, desert sun bleached shells, rusted fenders glowing under vast plains light. Lyon sees beauty not in nostalgia but in the transformation itself—the way decay enhances line and form, the way history settles into metal.

Junk ultimately stands as a meditation on impermanence and the artifacts we leave behind. These abandoned vehicles become symbols of a nation in motion, now paused, inviting viewers to contemplate the passage of time and the unexpected grace found in what has been left to weather and fade.

This picaresque memoir dives into the heart of the revolutionary 20th century through the lens of one of its most crucial witnesses, American photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon. His story begins in the Czar-ruled Russia of 1905, when Lyon’s uncle Abram fled to Brooklyn after his involvement in the murder of a policeman during a pogrom. A few decades later, amid the upheaval of World War II, Lyon was born. Presaged by this beginning, Lyon’s life has overseen adventures and tragedies of world-historical proportions. This Is My Life I’m Talking About recounts them in generous detail, from Lyon’s friendship with the great American civil rights hero John Lewis―who is best known for his chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee―to his involvement with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, upon which his famous photojournalist work The Bikeriders (1968) was based. Throughout, Lyon writes with tremendous feeling and humor, and his text is accompanied by a selection of unpublished and unseen photographs. An early exponent of New Journalism, Danny Lyon (born 1942) is one of the most influential documentary photographers of the last six decades. While still a student at the University of Chicago, he was jailed in the South and became the first staff photographer of the SNCC. He went on to publish the seminal photobooks The Bikeriders and Conversations with the Dead (1971), an interrogation of the Texas prison system. Later in life, he pivoted to filmmaking, partnering with Robert Frank.

Danny Lyon is one of the 20th century’s most influential documentary photographers. In The Seventh Dog, Lyon tells the story of his personal photographic journey, beginning in the present day and moving back in time through the 1950s.

Beautifully produced, this unique photo book features Lyon’s own writings, collages, letters, documents, and color and black–and–white photographs – many published here for the first time.

First published in 1968, and now back in print for the first time in ten years, The Bikeriders explores firsthand the stories and personalities of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. This journal-size volume features original black-and-white photographs and transcribed interviews by Lyon, made from 1963 to 1967, when he was a member of the Outlaws gang.

Authentic, personal and uncompromising, Lyon's depiction of individuals on the outskirts of society offers a gritty yet humane perspective that subverts more commercialized treatments of Americana. Akin to the documentary style of 1960s-era New Journalism made famous by writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, Lyon's photography is saturation reporting at its finest. The Bikeriders is a touchstone publication of 1960s counterculture, crucially defining the vision of the outlaw biker as found in Easy Rider and countless other movies and photobooks.