Danny Lyon
Template:TOCnestleft Danny Lyon was a photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which played a huge role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's.
Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn to Russian and German parents and grew up in Queens, NY. He was married to Stephanie Lyon (Chrisman) and Nancy Lyon (Weiss). He has four children: Gabrielle Lyon, Raphael Lyon, Noah Ernst Lyon, and Rebecca Lyon.
Background
Danny Lyon was a prominent photographer of the Civil Rights movement. Danny Lyon studied history at University of Chicago and is self-taught in photography. He was a member and photographer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1963-64, and the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, 1965-66. Lyon has been an independent photographer since 1962 and a filmmaker since 1969. He was an associate photographer for Magnum Photos, 1967-75, and a writer and essayist since 1973. He is a self-publisher, with Nancy Lyon since 1980 and Michael Hausman, as Bleak Beauty Books, since 1988. Lyon received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, 1969, and in filmmaking, 1979 and a Rockefeller Fellowship in filmmaking. 1990. He was a teacher of non-fiction film at SUNY/Buffalo and at Columbia University, and a photography teacher at Queensborough Community College. His latest book, Like A Thief's Dream, is the non-fiction story of an Arkansas murder.[1]
New Journalism
"Brooklyn-born Photographer Danny Lyon has always combined the opportunistic eye of a good lensman with a radical idealism, forged in the Sixties when he first emerged as a major figure, producing the “New Journalism” with a camera. His appetite for the frontline has remained undimmed throughout his career, which he documents in The Seventh Dog, a magnificent, personal overview of his life and work."[2]
Bernie Sanders Photos
Danny Lyon took iconic photos of Bernie Sanders as a young activist while Sanders "was talking at a gathering of students holding a sit in in protest at institutional racism againt black students in Chicago."[3]
Danny Lyon described the scene:
- "In 1962 and the spring of 1963 I was the student photographer at the University of Chicago, making pictures for the yearbook, the Alumni Magazine and the student paper, The Maroon. By the summer of 1962 I had taken my camera into the deep South, and become the first photographer for SNCC.
- "That winter at the University of Chicago, there was a sit-in inside the administration building protesting discrimination against blacks in university owned housing. I went to it with a CORE activist and friend. The sit in was in a crowded hallway, blocking the entrance to the office of Dr. George Beadle, the chancellor.
- "I took the photograph of Bernie Sanders speaking to his fellow CORE members at that sit-in. Bob McNamara, a close friend and CORE activist, is in the very corner next to me in the picture. Across the room from me is another campus photographer named Wexler, who taught me how to develop film."