On the road with Danny Lyon

A Google search for ‘Danny Lyon’ produces more than eight million results in 0.30 seconds, yet the celebrated American photojournalist and filmmaker is little known in the UK. This superb, quixotic, bare-all memoir ought to change that. Starting in 1962, Lyon not only photographed the heroes of the US civil rights movement as staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced ‘snick’), but in a way was one of the heroes himself, risking jail, beatings and abuse.

He’s had prizes galore and two solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2016 he had a major retrospective in San Francisco and at the Whitney; and also a big show last year at the Albuquerque Museum, near the adobe house in New Mexico he built for himself with the help of a Mexican labourer who became a friend.

Danny Lyon and I were classmates at the University of Chicago, as was Bernie Sanders, a good mate of Danny’s whom I didn’t know at all, and of whose youthful Trotskyist politics my own New Left friends disapproved. My contact with Danny was confined to our first year when I had a plausible fake ID that allowed me to buy the beer for our drinking sessions with his biker friend, Frank Jenner, a fellow undergraduate and one of Danny’s subjects.

In 1962, Lyon hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois, where he was inspired by John Lewis, the chairman of SNCC. Lewis became Lyon’s roommate for a couple of years, and was a US congressman from 1987 to his death in 2020. Lyon writes:

For the next year or so, I would have SNCC to myself as a photographer. Across the Black Belt of the South, the great-grandchildren of enslaved people were rising up to destroy Jim Crow.