ABOUT

What is America? In 1962 a young New Yorker named Danny Lyon decided to find out. He began a journey of discovery, both as witness and committed participant, that was to last over eighteen years, taking him from the civil rights movement in the South to a Chicago motorcycle gang, to Texas prisons, to Latin America, and finally home to New York. For Lyon photography became a means of recording his commitment to and love for a continent, as well as a means of defending his own humanity against the deadly encroachments of a technological society. An unusual autobiography, Lyon's Pictures from the New World is perhaps the nearest pictorial equivalent to Walt Whitman's compendium of his roamings through a grand but divided America of a previous century, or to Jack Kerouac's record of his impassioned journey on the road of a previous generation.