Danny Lyon has long been considered one of the most original and influential documentary photographers. He pioneered the style of photographic ‘New Journalism’ as he rebelled against Life magazine style photographs, instead immersing himself as a participant with his documented subjects. He produced his major bodies of work in this way: living with the Chicago outlaw motorcycle club for The Bikeriders, immersing himself in the Texas prison system for Conversations with the Dead, and documenting the boarded-up lower Manhattan buildings before a major demolition in Destruction of Lower Manhattan. Since this work in the early 1960s and 1970s, Lyon has produced numerous highly collectible photobooks, won two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and ten National Endowment for the Arts awards. In this book, for the first time, Lyon has collected his photo essays from over forty years of his remarkable career. A radical and maverick figure, much of this work was considered too controversial for publication at the time of its creation and never reached the American public. Essays collects together this wide body of work – from sensual images of girls in a barrio of Colombian brothels, to stunning portraits of young local boys in 1965 Chicago, from his most famous bodies of work to never before published projects – to produce a lasting testimony of the time and the people he pictured.
