Outlaw Eye: An Interview with Photographer Danny Lyon

Lyon made his reputation as an exciting frontline photographer by diving into confrontation from the very beginning of his career. In 1962, in the summer of his last year in college, he covered the civil rights protests in Mississippi as the official photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He would eventually put together those photos with his reminiscences and historical documents for the 1992 book Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

While still in his 20s, Lyon rode with the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, to produce the amazing and iconic series of photos in his groundbreaking The Bikeriders, in 1968. He then got a virtually unlimited backstage pass to take pictures of inmates inside the Texas prison system. That became the 1971 classic Conversations with the Dead.

If, at 60, Lyon's days of youthful adventuring are over, he still has a bit of an outlaw streak in him, and can still get juiced up telling tales of close shaves with The Man. He and his wife Nancy visited and photographed Cuba last spring, returning home through Canada, and drew the suspicions of U.S. Customs agents on their way back into the United States. When he tells the tale, his righteous outrage is mitigated by a certain defiant glee.

"They're going, 'You sure you haven't been anywhere else but Toronto?' We had these dark tans, the surfboard, the casting rods." He grins. "I'm like, 'Yeah. Toronto?I mean, uh?and Nova Scotia.' We go through three or four more of these people and they get more and more threatening. One guy puts on the plastic gloves and says, 'I'm gonna ask you one more time. Are you certain you haven't been anywhere else?' And he's going through my things, and just then he found this great guidebook to Havana. I just couldn't bear to throw it out, which you're supposed to do... The lights went off, they started screaming at us. And this one woman comes over and starts screaming, 'And they had oranges too!' This guy is screaming to me, 'You were lying to me!'

"Basically, we violated three federal statutes. They took my passport. This is the United States of America. I'd just finished photographing a serious communist dictatorship, which it is, but I go anywhere I want, nobody bugs me... But I get back to the United States and I'm harassed, I'm humiliated, they go through all this shit. I'd violated three statutes, including the Trading with the Enemy Act."

He did come back with some great photos, including one of a wall mural honoring Che Guevara. He sarcastically wonders if the U.S. Postal Service might ever want to use that one in its "Masters of Photography" stamp series. Or maybe "the one of the policeman giving me the finger" he took in Mississippi in 1963.

Lyon has just published a new book, Indian Nations: Pictures of American Indian Reservations in the Western United States, with an introduction by Larry McMurtry (Twin Palms, 164 pages, $60; www.twinpalms.com). The new book doesn't have the confrontational drama of his earlier photography, but for Lyon, it's another chronicle of his lifelong fascination with closed societies. He likes to photograph people who otherwise barely register on the national radar. Traveling through New Mexico and to isolated places like the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation or South Dakota's Sioux Rosebud Reservation, he enters worlds that most middle-class people never see. This time, the assignment turned out to be a tougher subject than he thought.

"You go to some of these places as a photographer and it's very difficult, because you look around and nothing's happening," he says. "People are indoors. There's no center of anything. On the other hand, they're like small American towns. There's a basketball team, I saw a couple parades. [But] often there's nothing happening. If you're like me, and kind of come in from outer space and want something to photograph, it's difficult. I photographed a horseshoe contest, which was actually exciting to watch. It was beautiful."

Lyon says his interest in native people goes back to when he watched the Lone Ranger and Tonto on television as a kid growing up in Queens. But it was while traveling to Belize in the 1990s and hearing about the Mayan uprising in Mexico's Chiapas region that he really started thinking about taking pictures of native people. As he writes in his 1999 autobiography Knave of Hearts, "A hundred years after the last 'battle' of the Indian wars in the United States, the modern Mexican army was fighting against an army of indigenous Mayan people."

Intrigued, Lyon headed to Chiapas with his camera to shoot the local Zapatista uprising, which resulted in Letter from Chiapas.

What Indian Nations turned out to be was, as one Native American teen girl who saw it said, "pictures of everyday events in Indian life." Couples kissing, families hanging out, dancers dressed in traditional clothes at pow-wows. When Lyon asked her which one was her favorite picture, she picked the portrait of tattooed tough guy James DeDios, who poses for Lyon's camera making gang symbols. Since Lyon is not a teenage girl, he can't quite understand the choice.

"He's a gangbanger," he says with obvious dismay. "He's a jerk."

That girl is one of only a handful of Indians who have seen the pictures that appear in the book; it disturbs Lyon that his subjects, who are among the poorest Americans, can't afford to see themselves in the $60 tome. Part of the proceeds from Indian Nations will help establish a photography workshop for Indians.

Many critics consider Lyon a pioneer of a socially conscious documentary photography that cleared the way for Mary Ellen Mark, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Shelby Lee Adams and others whose work looks at people living on the margins of mainstream society. He's never a disinterested reporter, but an activist who participates in the events he records; he was a "new journalist" before Tom Wolfe coined the phrase.

The milestones in Lyon's life also form a rough arc of the counterculture's rise and eventual accommodation with the mainstream. Knave of Hearts, his autobiography, is full of such 60s-hipster episodes as smoking pot with photography legend and pal Robert Frank, going to happenings, watching Yoko Ono cast one of her movies in a Bowery loft while John Lennon slept in a corner. Back then, Lyon was never far from where the action was.

People who only know a little of Lyon's work might know him best for The Bikeriders. Between 1963 to 1967 he hung with and photoed the Outlaw Motorcycle Club in what he writes was "an attempt to record and glorify the life of the American bikerider." The Bikeriders went on to become one of the most influential books of American photography, with its gritty subject matter and frankly sympathetic treatment of bikers, and earned Lyon a reputation as a skilled documentary photographer who was breaking free from the Middle American propriety of picture magazines like Life and Look.

In 1967 and 1968, he found the ultimate outlaw subject: prison inmates. Long before inside-the-prison documentaries were available around the clock on cable television, Lyon made an unflinching study of the prison system in Texas, where he was allowed to shoot everything but the electric chair. The resulting Conversations with the Dead is considered by many to be his masterwork. The brutality of prison life growls from every shot. Inmates dressed in ghostly white jumpsuits and herded onto a hillside to clear it of brush look like otherworldly spirits. Lyon revels in portraits of vicious-looking prisoners covered with hardcore jailhouse tattoos, or jailers shaking down inmates.

What makes Lyon unusual among documentary photographers is his standard approach of adding a lot of text to his books. This preference for text is a taste not shared by fellow documentarians, who usually follow strict and Spartan rules of photography, the principal being to let the pictures tell the story. Lyon happily ignores it. A typical Lyon production is a collage of photographs, stories and bureaucratic reports. Conversations, filled already with those stark portraits of inmates, also shows us prison reports as chilling as the pictures. Student of history that he is, he can't resist including historical ephemera in his books, like a 1964 handbill inviting the public to a speech by Fanny Chaney, mother of James Chaney, one of three civil rights workers murdered earlier that year by the Ku Klux Klan.

"I've been attacked for that, seriously put down for that," he says of the writing that goes into his photo books. "I got really hurt about 20 years ago. Somebody wrote a big book about photography. Big thick book. One of those histories of photography. It said, 'Danny Lyon, the 60s answer to Robert Frank,' and all this praise. But then it says, 'His stuff is really no good because it relies on the text.' I was deeply hurt. I said to Nancy, 'This guy has really buried me.'"

That was Jonathan Green in his 1984 book, American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present. Green really did let Lyon have it:

What Frank was able to do in a single book [The Americans], Lyon could not approach in four... It was a measure of those times?and a lesson in the vicissitudes of critical judgment?that the viewers and critics were so overwhelmed by the thematic radicalness that we failed to see that Lyon never found a form that complemented or contained the subject... The Bikeriders and Conversations with the Dead are powerful books, but it is the tape recorder and the Xerox machine that give them substance. The camera, it seems, is the least authentic witness. Only the text, made up from actual transcripts, letters, drawings, and bureaucratic reports, restores life to the characters. As in the strongest documents of the thirties, it is the nuance, the locution, the awkward prose that convinces and terrifies.

For The Bikeriders, Lyon did indeed take a tape recorder with him to capture the voices of the Outlaws. The book is as dense with oral history, and 1960s hipster style, as it is with riveting photographs of leather-clad toughs. In one transcription, Lyon captures club member Cal waxing lyrical about his "chopped scooter":

You know what I dig, man? I dig them beautiful customized jobs. You know why? 'Cause I look at a scooter, man, that's completely chopped, man, and every part on it he either made himself or bought special for it. Now you look at that dude, man, and that dude's an outlaw. Whenever he rides, man, part of that scooter is him, 'cause it's got his ideas and it's just him. Every scooter, see?

Lyon is candid about the ethical dilemma any documentary photographer must face when shooting "real," poor, outcast subjects: he's intruding on their privacy.

"A really angry guy, a Lakota, really militant and political, once said to me, 'How would you like it if I came to your house and took a picture of you?' I thought this guy was going to strangle me. And the truth is, I would not like it if he came to my house and took a picture of me. I would hate it."

He remembers when he was living in New Mexico. "I shot a dog once. I shot two dogs that day. They had killed seven chickens. I killed two dogs. But one of them made it back home, and it became a big brouhaha. It became front-page news, it was on television. And when this tv crew came to the house, I did not like it. So he had a point."

Lyon had left New York for New Mexico in 1970, his reputation well established by then. In the 1970s, like his colleague Robert Frank, he turned away from still photography to work instead with film. He says he felt the need to document his subjects' lives in more depth than he could in a still photo alone. He's made a number of movies, including Llanito, Willie and El Mojado, but few have been seen outside of small film festivals, and he laughs a little bitterly when asked about his "film career."

"Career? Call it a disaster! How about 'my years of devotion to the art of filmmaking.' Got that?"

Characteristically, Lyon's first film was a documentary about a Houston tattoo parlor owner, Bill Sanders. Lyon had heard about him from Jimmy Renton, a prisoner he befriended when he was working on Conversations. Lyon describes the shop as filled with photographs of Sanders' clients. "Many of them were masterpieces of photography," he writes. "There were rows of portraits of people with nipple rings and rings through their sex organs a generation before punk singers would bring this practice to the high school kids of the middle class."

Today Lyon lives on a farm in upstate Ulster County where, he says, "We have raised pigs and chickens and trout in our pond, all of which are to eat. We raise all the vegetables we eat." Apparently Farmer Lyon is not as skillful as Photographer Lyon. "Been rescued three times from my tractor work by the local volunteer fire department," he admits. "They are the best."

In darkroom terms, Lyon has always been very much a traditional photographer, though he says he has taken to using Photoshop and enjoys the freedom of his website, BleakBeauty.com. "No editor!" he says. The site's name comes from years past when he would watch the prostitutes and junkies from his apartment on the then-ungentrified Chrystie St. He uses the site to indulge in what he calls "reports"?small-scale photo essays that don't require the time or effort that a book does.

Intriguingly, a book he's working on now will be all text, with no photos. Called Like a Thief's Dream, it's based on letters between him and Jimmy Renton.

"He escaped from the penitentiary, then he got caught, then he spent another 18 years in prison and died in prison" in 1996, Lyon explains. "While he was in prison he wrote an account of this escape for me. So I have this documentary work, written in his handwriting, that's the core of this book... This guy was a good friend of mine. He was a printer. He had been a kid in the federal penitentiary, and they taught him lithography. And of course, if you're a thief and they teach you lithography, what do you do when you get out? You print $20 bills. So his next crime was counterfeiting," he laughs.

Lyon's own family is animating another current project: a film titled Two Fathers, about his own father, a Queens eye doctor, and the father he himself has become. He's visibly proud of his "anarchist" son Raphael, who's making a movie in Argentina, and of wife Nancy, a quiltmaker, as well as his other children: son Noah runs a website at www.retardriot.com and his daughter Gabrielle founded an educational service for kids in inner-city Chicago. Even with a career that has included some dangerous moments, there's no question what Lyon considers the biggest challenge of his life.

"Being a father is by far the hardest thing I ever did," he says. "I used to think it was hard to be an artist. Forget it. It's duck soup."

Danny Lyon will sign copies of Indian Nations at the Edwynn Houk Gallery Sat., Nov. 16, 2-4 p.m. 745 5th Ave. (betw. 57th & 58th Sts.), 750-7070; www.houkgallery.com.