DANNY LYON
INDIAN NATIONS

Exhibit Dates: October 18 - November 18, 2002
Reception for the Artist: Friday, Oct. 18, 5-7 p.m.


Andrew Smith Gallery presents an exhibit of new photographs by Danny Lyon titled Indian Nations, opening October 18, 2002, with a reception and book signing for Mr. Lyon from 5-7 p.m. Indian Nations was produced over a period of four years when Lyon visited nineteen Indian reservations to photograph members of the Sioux, Apache and Western tribes. According to Lyon, he wanted to document a reality that is mostly ignored, and to capture "a people and sad beauty that is at the core of our history and our country." Lyon used a large format Polaroid that enabled him to show the pictures he was taking to the people pictured in them. In some images, the subject of the photograph holds up the portrait that Lyon had just taken. Other photographs document the eroded, wind-swept region that has been home to American Indians since time immemorial. The photographs in the exhibit are the subject of a new book titled, Indian Nations, published by Twin Palms, with an introduction by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry writes, "In fidelity to, and in the context of their ancient places, his [Lyon's] subjects preserve a hard worn dignity. Clear your eyes and look."

Danny Lyon was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, NY and attended the University of Chicago where he received a B.A. in history in 1963. A self-taught photographer, he joined the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1963 to document the U.S. civil-rights movement, photographs that later appeared in a book called The Movement. Lyon's went on to become an important American photographer, filmmaker, and writer. The Guggenheim Foundation awarded him a fellowship in photography in 1969, and another in film ten years later. He has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, and the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona. He has also been a member of the Magnum Photo Agency.

An activist with a camera, Lyon has spent his career photographing marginalized groups in the U.S. and abroad, drawing attention to the human spirit's struggle for economic survival, and providing an inside look at radical, counter-culture lifestyles. His grittier photographs are not for the faint-hearted. Their power lies in Lyon's ability to create a simple tableau that reveals cultural intensity at its fullest, making it impossible for viewers to side-step challenging issues. During the 1960s and 1970s Lyon photographed members of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, publishing these images in his book, The Bikeriders. His book Conversations with the Dead chronicled the lives of prisoners within the Texas prison system. He also photographed prostitutes and street urchins in the streets and barrios of Santa Marta and Cartagena, Columbia. In the 1970s and 1980s Lyon lived near Bernalillo, New Mexico, where he made many of his best known images of local people and the landscape.

For more information or press prints please call Andrew Smith Gallery at (505) 984-1234, Fax (505) 983-2428. Our e-mail address is info@AndrewSmithGallery.com. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday 10-5, and Sunday 12-4.

Liz Kay
Click here to view the show.