Exhibition - Danny Lyon: The Bikeriders

THE BIKERIDERS explores Lyon’s experience as a member of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club from 1963-1967.  In his words it was an "attempt to record and glorify the life of the American bikerider”.  Lyon began riding with and documenting the Outlaws at twenty-one years old while an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. The publication of his seminal book The Bikeriders (1968) introduced a style of documentary photography and reporting that placed him in the forefront of the New Journalism movement in which the photographer is immersed in and participating with the subject being documented. His work tells the story of a subversive motorcycle club and endures as a time capsule of 1960s Americana. His form of New Journalism with its intimacy, transparency, and humanism was radical. 

The exhibition will be presented in conjunction with the June 2024 release of the Focus Features film, The Bikeriders,written and directed by Jeff Nichols. Inspired by Lyon’s book of the same name, this fictional account traces the history of a club of motorcycle enthusiasts called the Vandals as it devolves into a sinister gang of thugs and murderers.  The film stars Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, and Mike Faist as Danny Lyon.  The characters and the narrative are taken from Lyons pictorial account and audio recordings of his time as a member of the club.

About the Artist

Danny Lyon (b. 1942, Brooklyn, New York) is a self-taught American documentary photographer and filmmaker. An innovator of New Journalism documentation, Lyon’s worked from the inside, as a participant in his chosen subject.  In 1968 he joined the civil rights movement and became chief photographer for SNCC where he became the roommate of and lifelong friend of Senator John Lewis.  Following that he spent 6 months photographing from within the Texas penal system where he befriended notoriously dangerous convicts. In 1971 the project was published in Conversations with the Dead.  He received a BA in history in 1963 from the University of Chicago, where he served as a staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. 

Lyon has received numerous awards and accolades including the Rockefeller Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship in film, and the National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from The Art Institute of Boston and his work has been collected by major institutions such as the George Eastman House, Museum of the City of New York, The Photographers’ Gallery in London, Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Baltimore Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Boston MFA,  and Philadelphia Art Museum. 

Lyon’s first solo exhibition was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1966 and his first comprehensive retrospective, Danny Lyon: Message to the Future, premiered at the Whitney in 2016. His seminal films include Soc. Sci. 127 (1969), Los Niños Abandonados (1975), and Little Boy (1977). Lyon has published several photographic books based on his immersive documentation of his subjects, such as The Bikeriders (1968), which details his experiences with outlaw motorcyclists exploring the American Midwest, Conversations with the Dead (1971), an interrogation of the Texas prison system, and Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (1992). His memoir, This Is My Life I’m Talking About, was published by Damiani in April 2024.