The last time a Danny Lyon retrospective took place, Williamsburg was still dangerous and The Spice Girls didn’t exist yet. But that doesn’t mean the Queens-born photographer has been letting his camera collect dust since documenting the civil rights protests, biker gangs, and squalid tattoo parlors of the late 60s. At 74, Lyon is as immersed in the stories of social outcasts and outsiders as ever, having spent the last few years capturing the bleak beauty of disenfranchised communities from Oakland (where Occupy protesters eat off paper plates in crowded tents) to China (where miners glean coal from the train tracks of Datong). These more recent photographs are now being combined with archival ones to form Danny Lyon: Message to the Future. The massive exhibition of approximately 175 photos opens at the new Whitney Museum of American Art this weekend.
The exhibition will also include three rare videos, absorbing viewers in a form of expression that Lyon found himself drawn to when he returned home after six years of following the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. These videos include a 21-minute portrait of the late great tattoo artist Bill Sanders and his “painless” tattoo studio, a 15-minute one of the sculptor Mark di Suvero, and an 82-minute documentary detailing the past and present of prisoner Willie Jaramillo. Willie combines footage of the repeat minor offender’s early life with powerful scenes of his penitentiary’s worst jail cells. Danny and Nancy Weiss Lyon gained exclusive access to the prison to portray its inhabitants with an immediacy that still photography could never fully facilitate.
“Danny Lyon: Message to the Future” runs from June 17 through September 25, 2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Images courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art