Carlos Ross
Darryl Pablo, Sacaton, Arizona Gila River Reservation, 1999. Danny Lyon.
Artist Bio: Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn in 1942. He is a photographer and a filmmaker, neither of which he received any official schooling for. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a history degree in 1963. His first published photographs were for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, one of the largest civil rights groups in the 1960’s. After this, he began publishing his own books. For his first book, Bikeriders, he followed around biker gangs and took photos of them, even becoming a member of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. In all his works, he becomes immersed in the subject. For perhaps his most famous work, Conversations With the Dead, he photographed the grim realities of prison life in the United States, befriending many of the prisoners along the way. His most recent project, Indian Nations, was published in 2001. Lyon received the Guggenheim for photography in 1969. He sums up his thoughts on photography as such: “Photography works best when it does what it is uniquely qualified to do as a medium: reproduce the real world.”
Caption: This photograph follows a long line of Danny Lyon documentary style photographs. It is part of his most recent collection, Indian Nations, in which he visited nineteen different Indian Reservations in the Western United States and took photographs of the people and landscapes there. If we follow along with his idea of photography, using it to reproduce the real world, then Lyon certainly saw the Native American world as a bleak one, and chose to show it as such with this photograph. The expression on the man’s face is downtrodden, as he stares off into the distance. However, it is the inclusion of the fence right behind him that separates this image. The way it is composed, it is difficult to tell whether the man put up the fence to keep something in, or if somebody else put it up to keep him out. His arm is grabbing the bars of the fence much as a prisoner might grab the bars of his prison cell. The image can be looked at as symbolic of the Native American’s ongoing struggle to regain their freedom, still stuck behind the bars of the society that we imposed on them hundreds of years ago.
Darryl Pablo, Sacaton, Arizona Gila River Reservation, 1999. Danny Lyon.
Artist Bio: Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn in 1942. He is a photographer and a filmmaker, neither of which he received any official schooling for. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a history degree in 1963. His first published photographs were for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, one of the largest civil rights groups in the 1960’s. After this, he began publishing his own books. For his first book, Bikeriders, he followed around biker gangs and took photos of them, even becoming a member of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. In all his works, he becomes immersed in the subject. For perhaps his most famous work, Conversations With the Dead, he photographed the grim realities of prison life in the United States, befriending many of the prisoners along the way. His most recent project, Indian Nations, was published in 2001. Lyon received the Guggenheim for photography in 1969. He sums up his thoughts on photography as such: “Photography works best when it does what it is uniquely qualified to do as a medium: reproduce the real world.”
Caption: This photograph follows a long line of Danny Lyon documentary style photographs. It is part of his most recent collection, Indian Nations, in which he visited nineteen different Indian Reservations in the Western United States and took photographs of the people and landscapes there. If we follow along with his idea of photography, using it to reproduce the real world, then Lyon certainly saw the Native American world as a bleak one, and chose to show it as such with this photograph. The expression on the man’s face is downtrodden, as he stares off into the distance. However, it is the inclusion of the fence right behind him that separates this image. The way it is composed, it is difficult to tell whether the man put up the fence to keep something in, or if somebody else put it up to keep him out. His arm is grabbing the bars of the fence much as a prisoner might grab the bars of his prison cell. The image can be looked at as symbolic of the Native American’s ongoing struggle to regain their freedom, still stuck behind the bars of the society that we imposed on them hundreds of years ago.