Danny Lyon’s Texas Prison Photographs

Howard Greenberg Gallery will current Danny Lyon: The Texas Prison Photographs from December 5, 2025 by means of January 31, 2026. A landmark depiction of incarceration, the exhibition options images, movies, drawings, and ephemeral from 1967-68. The Texas Prison Photographs marks acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon’s first present with Howard Greenberg Gallery following the announcement of the Gallery’s illustration of Lyon in April 2025.

The exhibition will open with a reception on December 5 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. with the artist in attendance.
 
Danny Lyon revolutionized documentary pictures within the Sixties along with his radical participatory strategy, notably within the Civil Rights Movement and with the Chicago Outlaws motorbike membership, which led to his ebook, The Bikeriders. His New Journalism model was rooted in involvement, as he defined: “I was a participant who also happened to be a photographer.”
 
In 1967, Lyon gained unprecedented entry to seven Texas penitentiaries for 14 months, aiming to file the truth of incarceration. He was free to enter the prisons at any time of the day or night time, and photographed males of their cells, within the fields and factories the place they labored, consuming on the cafeteria, in isolation and through shakedowns. This resulted in uncooked, empathetic photographs of marginalized people, revealed in 1971 because the extremely regarded photobook Conversations with the Dead.

Known for his immersive strategy, Lyon’s model broke from conventional journalism by mixing private perspective with documentary storytelling. Revolutionary for its time, Conversations with the Dead was among the many first photobooks to include ephemeras, setting a brand new customary in journalism and pictures and influencing generations.
 
Presenting Lyon’s file of Texas prisons, the exhibition will showcase primarily classic prints alongside choose trendy work and authentic art work by the incarcerated, in addition to drawings, letters, prison-related paperwork, audio interviews, and 16mm movie footage. Taken as a complete, the exhibition affords not solely a uncommon and intimate glimpse into life inside seven Texas penitentiaries within the late Sixties however highlights the relationships Lyon constructed with inmates. On view for the primary time, the exhibition may also current unpublished footage by Lyon from his visits to the Goree Unit, Texas’s ladies’s penitentiary.
 
As the copy on the again of the paperback version of Conversations with the Dead famous, “This shattering portrait of oppression and futility must be recognized as a plea to American Society—the ultimate warden of all our prisons.”
 
“I kept wondering what the story was, what wasn’t in the papers yet, what I could discover and make public with my pictures,” Lyon has acknowledged. “Texas would change my life.”
 
Concurrent with the exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery, Lyon’s movies, together with Willie (1985) and his movies about undocumented Mexican employees, will probably be introduced at Metrograph and the Roxy Cinema.

About Danny Lyon

Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn in 1942 and grew up in Queens. He purchased his first digital camera throughout a summer season journey in Germany earlier than beginning on the University of Chicago. In 1962 he hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois, to start his file of the civil rights motion. He turned the primary photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and attended most main civil rights occasions, turning into mates and roommates with John Lewis.

In 1965, he spent two years with the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, which resulted within the acclaimed ebook The Bikeriders (Macmillan, 1968; Twin Palms, 1997; Chronicle, 2003; Aperture, 2014). In 1967, he moved to Texas to work within the penitentiary system and revealed Conversations with the Dead (Henry Holt and Co., 1971; Phaidon, 2015). After Texas he moved to New York and lived with the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. They shaped an organization, Sweeney Films, and Lyon turned his focus to non-fiction movies.

Lyon moved to New Mexico in 1970, then to upstate New York in 1987. In 2023 The Bikeriders was launched as a serious movement image.

His pictures could be discovered within the collections of main museums together with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Lyon is an lively blogger at bleakbeauty.com.

He presently lives and works in New York City and New Mexico.

About Howard Greenberg Gallery

Since its inception in New York greater than 40 years in the past, Howard Greenberg Gallery has constructed an enormous and ever-changing assortment of among the most vital images within the medium. The Gallery’s assortment acts as a residing historical past of pictures, providing genres and types from Pictorialism to Modernism, along with modern pictures and pictures conceived for business, promoting, and trend.
 
Formerly a photographer and founding father of The Center for Photography in Woodstock in 1977, Howard Greenberg has been one among a small group of gallerists, curators, and historians liable for the creation and growth of the trendy marketplace for pictures. Howard Greenberg Gallery—based in 1981 and initially often called Photofind—was the primary to persistently exhibit photojournalism and road pictures, now accepted as vital elements of photographic artwork.

The Gallery is situated within the Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street, Suite 801, in New York City. The Gallery’s archive is situated at 32 East 57th Street, straight throughout from the Fuller Building, to accommodate, handle, and current its assortment of over 40,000 prints.

For extra data, contact 212-334-0010 or [email protected], or go to www.howardgreenberg.com.