CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD

Danny Lyon

11.25 x 8.25 hardcover book with 196 pages with numerous full-page b/w plates and color reproductions of McCuneıs drawings. Lyon's seminal photographs of prison life stand as one of the great post-war works of photojournalism, firmly placing this book among the ranks of Evans'and Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Bourke-White's and Caldwell's You Have Seen Their Faces. This was Lyon's fourth book following The Movement, Bikeriders, and The Destruction of Lower Manhattan. "Lyon's photographs must be the most eloquent ever shot in a prison."--Parr and Badger.

The published extension of a 1970 Rice University Museum exhibition of forty-two photographs by Danny Lyon along with forty-two drawings by inmate Billy McCune. One of the highlights of the New American Landscape movement, and a Roth 101 title. to boot.

"Lyon may be described as one of photography's great loners" (Parr & Badger I:256). To fellow photographer Nan Goldin, however, Lyon is also a journalist whose work "is not about the surface, the sensational, the soundbite; it is imbued with his respect for the people he photographs, and with the commitment and responsibility this respect entails" ( Artforum ). Conversations is simply a "masterpieceŠ Lyon's photographs must be amongst the most eloquent ever shot in a prison" (Parr & Badger II:18). In 1967, early in his career, Lyon entered the Texas prison system as a "'visiting photographer' and stayed for 14 monthsŠ Conversations with the Dead is at once an intimately engaged social document and a study in outlaw masculinity" (Roth, 210). Lyonıs record of convict life across six prisons includes 76 photographs, excerpts from convicts' writings and color reproductions of inmate Billy McCune's drawings. Originally published as a portfolio of 20 photographs, run off in the prison print shop under the title Born to Lose and smuggled out by Lyon, this 1971 first trade edition, published same year as the first edition, tries to "make a picture of imprisonment as distressing as I knew it to be in reality" (Lyons). See Open Book , 278.

"Dear and Respective Citizens of Texas. From a microscopic space called a cell, among the vast units of the Texas Department of Corrections is submitted work which represents feelings. My Feelings to your feelings, from my heart and brain to your heart and brain. My appeal of hope for a better mode of existence is expressed in the succeeding paragraphs. "-- Billy McCune #122054

Danny Lyonıs early documentary career was established and defined by his gritty photographer-as-participant approach. His first book, The Movement (1964), evolved from his experiences as a staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement. In the Bikeriders series (1968), Lyon rode and lived with the bikers he photographed. Lyonıs work belies the standard detachment of documentary humanism and objectivism in favor of a more complicated subjective involvement. Danny Lyonıs photojournalistic style is marked by its staunch pursuit of the unembellished moment. Clearing Land, Ellis Unit, Texas, a picture of a prison work gang, is part of a series on prison life that later became the book Conversations with the Dead (1971). Continuing his interest in the communities that develop ­ voluntarily or otherwise ­ on the outskirts of mainstream society, Lyon photographed the daily routine and rituals that evolve in prison and within which issues of race, masculinity, and class coalesce.

Born in 1942 in Brooklyn, Danny Lyon received a BA from the University of Chicago in 1973. As a photographer and filmmaker, Lyon has shown insight into the worlds of those who live outside the mainstream of society. In 1967, for instance he was given unrestricted permission to photograph the lives of convicts in Texas prisons, resulting in the portfolio Conversations with the Dead (1971). His films include Little Boy (1977), Los Niños Abandonados (1975), and Social Sciences 127 (1969). Lyonıs work has been frequently exhibited and collected; he is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grants in both film and photography.

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