Danny Lyon American, 1942- Danny Lyon (born in Brooklyn) came to attention in the 1960s as a social documentary photographer whose sympathies with his subjects often grew from personal involvement in their causes. While studying history at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1963), he joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and served as the group's photographer. Since 1967 he has been an associate for the magnum photo agency and made extensive photo essays in the late 1960s-70s on the civil rights movement (The Movement, 1964), the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, of which he was a member (The Bikeriders, 1968), the demolition of historic 19th-century buildings in New York City (The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, 1969), and Texas prisons (Conversations with the Dead, 1971). For that series, Lyon included with his black-and-white photographs excerpts from handwritten letters, drawings, police reports, and telegrams. In 1977 the U.S. Justice Department used his images in a landmark legal case (Ruiz vs. Estelle) to improve conditions in prisons throughout Texas. Since the 1980s, Lyon has traveled to Colombia to photograph street children and prostitutes (The Paper Negative, 1980) and to Haiti to cover the events leading up to the collapse of the Duvalier regime in 1986. His own family has also become a continued subject of his work. Parallel to his photography, Lyon has made numerous films that are shown regularly in universities across the United States: Social Sciences 127 (1969), Llanito (1971), El Mojado (1973), Los Niños Abandonados (1975), Dear Mark (1975-80), Little Boy (1977), Willie (1986-87), and Media Man (c. 1993). He has published his own works since 1988 under the imprint Bleak Beauty Books, in collaboration with his wife, Nancy Lyon, and Michael Hausman. Lyon has also taught nonfiction film at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1986) and at Columbia University (1987-90). Among his honors are fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1969, 1979) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1990). He has had one-person exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (1966, 1969), the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California (1973), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1982). In 1991 a retrospective, Danny Lyon Photo Film, with accompanying catalogue, traveled internationally. Lyon lives in Clintondale, New York. A.W.