Issue 2 of Notebook magazine includes an original essay by Lyon, accompanied by a piece about the self-distribution of his works. The issue is currently available in select stores around the world.
In September 1962, Danny Lyon, a history and philosophy student at the University of Chicago, flew to Jackson, Mississippi to photograph voter registration workers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By 1963, Lyon was working as SNCC’s in-house photographer, and for the next two-plus years he would document nearly every major moment of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, including the March on Washington and historic demonstrations led by John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. If you’ve seen a photo from this era in a newspaper, magazine, or history book, there’s a good chance it was taken by Lyon.
But while the artist’s contemporaneous photos of an outlaw Chicago motorcycle gang and, later, Texas prison inmates—immortalized in the books The Bikeriders (1967) and Conversations with the Dead (1971), respectively—are just as iconic, by the end of the ‘60s the New York-born Lyon had given up photography and moved to Bernalillo, New Mexico. There he would embark on a subsequent career in filmmaking that until recently has been all but lost to history. Merging the philosophies of photographic New Journalism with the era’s burgeoning direct cinema aesthetics, Lyon’s films reflect the post-hippie malaise of his adopted home, alighting on neglected communities and troubled individuals living on the margins of society.
Shooting on 16mm, Lyon integrated himself into the local Chicano and Native American populaces, befriending and giving voice to people that are traditionally silenced, if not outright condemned. Many of his early films, such as El Mojada (1974) and The Other Side (1978), center on undocumented immigrants and workers. In the former, Lyon depicts the day-to-day struggles of a laborer from rural Chihuahua; in the latter, he re-stages an unlawful border crossing with a group of real-life citrus farmers. With their vérité look and sociopolitical sensibility, Lyon’s films from this period—many made in collaboration with his wife, Nancy Lyon, who he married in 1978—call to mind the work of contemporaries like Robert Drew, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, though there’s something distinctly personal and homespun in Lyon’s approach to form and subject that aligns him closer to outsider artists like Les Blank and one-time roommate and collaborator Robert Frank.
The unique power of Lyon’s project can be felt in a trilogy of films made over a fifteen year period in which he documented the tragic life of Willie Jaramillo, a young man who spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood in various New Mexico correctional facilities. When we first meet Willie, in Llanito (1971), he’s a neighborhood kid getting into mischief typical of any boy his age—just one face among many in a quasi-ensemble piece. Six years later, in Little Boy (1977)—a film that juxtaposes New Mexico’s history of nuclear testing with its longstanding institutional negligence—he’s eighteen and fresh out of prison, a traumatic experience which belies the quiet and congenial personality witnessed in fleeting scenes of casual conversation that nonetheless hang heavy with uncertainty. Willie (1985), the third and final film, offers no easy answers. Shot in and around the Sandoval County Jail, it features intimate interviews with Willie—now in his mid-20s and locked up in a cellblock alongside more serious offenders—as well as friends, family members, and other inmates who speak of him in near-mythological terms: as a kind of a living ghost, fated to exist out of both sight and mind.
Outside of a handful of screenings in New York, Chicago, and Boston in the 2000s and 2010s, Lyon’s early films have rarely been seen in the United States. In 2016, a multimedia exhibition at the Whitney brought his film work briefly back into the conversation, with screenings of some of the artist’s newer films following in many major cities. Last May, I attended Spain’s Play-Doc festival, where the first international retrospective of Lyon’s films was presented in the small Galician town of Tui; included in the program was SNCC (2020), Lyon’s latest work, in which he revisits the Civil Rights era through hundreds of unreleased images taken during his formative years as a photojournalist—a full circle moment for an artist whose films are both primed to be discovered and worthy of standing alongside his most celebrated work.
Following Play-Doc, Lyon and I caught up to discuss his transition from photography to filmmaking, the relationship between his practices, how New Mexico and its people have inspired his films, and how the issues presented in his work are as pertinent today as ever.
Soc. Sci. 127 (1969).
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about your initial inspiration to make films after years of practicing photography?
DANNY LYON: My father was a German immigrant, a doctor. He worked as an eye surgeon in New York but he was also an amateur photographer and filmmaker—he made Super 8 films. In 1959, after a trip to Europe, I came back to the U.S. with an East German reflex camera, an Exa, and I entered the University of Chicago, where I met Bernie Sanders; he was in my class. During my time there I met a bunch of people—I think I met Bernie Sanders, John Lewis, and the sculptor Mark di Suvero the same year, 1962.
At some point Mark invited me back to New York, and that introduced me to this whole group of artists—hardcore guys: painters and sculptors living in rat-infested lofts. I think in my head I considered myself an artist—but an artist with the camera. Still photography at that time wasn’t considered an art form by most people. Even Robert Frank, who I ended up living with, once said to me: "You know, Mary [Frank, Robert’s wife] was the artist; I wasn’t considered an artist.” So even though photography wasn’t thought of as an art form, I acted like an artist. I was emulating painters and sculptors—how they functioned. I didn’t do any commercial work. I wanted to live for this thing, to make a living by it, like some Dostoevsky character who knew that eventually their work would be discovered and appreciated. And that all turned out to be true, though it would take fifty years.
At that time, independent filmmaking—and by that I mean filmmaking as practiced by people like Kenneth Anger, Robert Frank, and Ken Jacobs, for instance—was considered the Cadillac of art forms. In other words, you could be a painter, a sculptor, a photographer—none of those cost much money. But filmmaking was expensive. At school I studied history and philosophy—I never studied photography or filmmaking. In my head I thought of the camera like an instrument in an orchestra, like a violin or a piano. I could play the piano, but when you’re a filmmaker you’ve got sound, voice, and visuals. So even though it was expensive, filmmaking was something I aspired to do. By 1968, when I was 26, I had done everything that would make my reputation as a photographer. My days of ripping Tri-X through the camera ended with the Texas prison photos in 1968. In that book, Conversations with the Dead, I thought I had realized everything that was possible in a photography book. Like all those books, it was a failure and remaindered. You could buy it for a dollar. A few years ago it was re-issued in facsimile by Phaidon.
Luckily for me, at that moment the American Film Institute started giving out money to make films. The National Endowment for the Arts, which funded all the other arts, was not giving out money to make films. In the 1970s the NEA did not consider filmmaking an art form. The only films they would fund were films about artists. Anyway, I showed the people at the AFI my Texas prison pictures, and I said, “I’m going to make a film about the prisons called Texas Underground,” which was bullshit. I knew I would never go back to the prisons—I was burned out after working in those horrible places for two years. But I knew a tattoo artist that I wanted to make a film about—an inmate had told me about him. That’s how I got the money to make my first short, Soc. Sci. 127 (1969):by obfuscating. And that was the pattern over the years—I would write anything I needed to in order to get funding.
NOTEBOOK: Your films fall in line with a lot of the direct cinema, or cinéma vérité, of the era. Were you aware of these various movements in nonfiction cinema?
LYON: Yes and no. It’s funny you mention that because when I had my show at the Whitney in 2016, a writer said, “Either Danny Lyon never saw all this other work going on, or he ignored it.” I think the answer is that I ignored it. Or in some cases, like the Maysles, who were big at the time, I intentionally tried to avoid it—I wouldn’t look at their films. I had my own thing, and I believed in it, for better or worse. A lot of the documentary devices, like voiceovers—I didn’t buy any of that. I had the luxury of not giving a shit.
I was more influenced by literature, particularly by James Agee. At the time I don’t think I had even read any of his film criticism, but I had read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and in that book he talked about film. He talked about the power of the camera, the unaided camera—and I believed in his description of that purity. Or similarly, John Dos Passos: if you read his U.S.A. Trilogy he uses chapters called “the camera eye.” They’re just breaks in the narrative, but it’s this idea that there is a way to look at the world from above it all, from somewhere pure. And that may or may not be true, but I simply believed in the power of the camera to capture reality.
With Soc. Sci. 127, I felt I had found a real person in the tattoo artist. First of all, he’s as good as any actor, and second, he’s this kind of Falstaffian comic drunk. He’s fabulous. So why do I need a script? Why do I need actors? Why do I need anything? All I have to do is get this guy’s personality down on film and edit it. In the same way, when I learn that Dostoevsky and Melville were inspired by the real world—it all supported my idea that it’s out there in reality, it’s just a question of not fucking it up. That was the source of my film work, and I pretty much stuck with it.
The Abandoned Children (1975).
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about the philosophical relationship between your film work and your photography?
LYON: I often use photography to discover a subject. My film The Abandoned Children (1975) began with me photographing one of the subjects, Joselyn, and his friends on the cathedral steps. Eighteen months later I returned with the equipment to film him. The films are oftentimes portraits of these individuals. For me, all my subjects are like characters in literature—they’re bigger than themselves. It ties into the idea that there is something in us, a humanity, that is greater than ourselves.
Photography is a technological art form. To do photography you need a machine. You don’t need a paint brush, or a pencil—you need a machine. Cameras tend to dehumanize people. It’s the nature of photography, it’s the nature of documentary footage, and it’s the nature of the news—to make you think the people being depicted are not real people. You know why? Because they’re not real people—they’re movies! I thought the right way to deal with this as an artist is to humanize the image. That’s what I tried to do with my photography and it’s what I try to do with my films.
NOTEBOOK: What initially brought you to New Mexico?
LYON: By 1969 I was successful and I had been exposed to a lot of photography. New York is full of photographers, so I was getting away from that. Also, the Vietnam War was really bad at the time—it just really turned me off. Moving to New Mexico was like moving to another country: people didn’t speak English where I went; it was a rural society. So I was out of the art scene. But there were a lot of hippies and communes and activity around the area. In 1970, New Mexico was a pretty vibrant place, much more than it is today.
NOTEBOOK: Was this communal spirit one of the things that inspired the films?
LYON: Yes. I thought if Faulkner could spend his life in Lafayette County, Mississippi, and turn that into the location for his work, then I could make something of Sandoval County, New Mexico, which was such a rich place, what with the relationship between Chicanos and Native Americans. I thought I could spend a lifetime making films here. And in a sense that was true.
Llanito (1971).
NOTEBOOK: How did you meet Willie Jaramillo and the Jaramillo family?
LYON: I was walking the streets of Bernalillo one day, when I was new to New Mexico, and ran into a bunch of kids playing with a goat, which is exotic for a New Yorker. It was the Sanchez brothers and Willie—they lived across the street from each other. Willie was about twelve and the Sanchez boys were as young as ten. Our relationship began with still photos. I have photographs of all the kids playing. I would know them for the rest of their lives. I would even bury some of them, and film their funerals.
NOTEBOOK: How did Willie come to be such a longstanding subject in your films?
LYON: It wasn’t planned. Willie first appeared in Llanito, my first long film. It’s split up into three parts: the first part focuses on Chicano children, including Willie; the second on St. Joseph’s Manor, a home for mentally challenged whites; and the third on my neighbors, the Santa Ana Native Americans.
Willie next appeared in Little Boy, which was a bicentennial film funded by the New Mexico Council for the Arts. It takes its name from the atom bomb that was built here in New Mexico and dropped on Hiroshima. There’s a museum here where you can go to learn about it. It’s funny but it’s not funny: it would be like if Hitler won the war and you could buy tickets to bring the kids to Auschwitz. Anyway, Little Boy has multiple characters, one of whom is Willie, who was now a teenager and in and out of the Sandoval County Jail, which was underneath the city hall in Bernalillo where my wife Nancy and I were married.
But the real chance encounter came in 1980. We were here in Bernalillo for the summer and one day when I was in town I saw Willie standing under a tree where kids would hang out. I hadn’t seen him in five years. Instinctually I thought I needed to film him—that’s the documentarian in me. And that’s what led to Willie. It turns out he had been in jail for five years. He had amazing stories to tell. He would end up in jail again, and in prison while we were shooting the film.
In order to layer the film Willie I wanted the audience to see him as a child, because I think in order to appreciate the pain he was living with you need to see some of his childhood. He was charming as a child, as was his brother, Fernie. I have footage of Fernie as an adorable eight year-old walking in the snow without shoes. SoI did something that I’ve always felt conflicted about. I cannibalized the earlier films and threw scenes from those into Willie, which bothered me but which works in the film. The heartbreaking story is realized in the final scene where Willie is dragged through the jail in chains and screaming in Spanish as he is teargassed. It cuts to him as a little boy shooting off M80s, one of them in the barrel of a rifle pointed right at the camera. It’s very poignant.
Willie (1985).
NOTEBOOK: Can you tell me about working with your wife, Nancy? She seems to be credited more and more in your films as the years went on.
LYON: When Nancy and I first started working together she did the sound. When you film on 16mm you need at least one other person there to record audio, which is what I had done for Robert Frank on two-and-a-half of films. For my early films I had a hippie friend doing sound, who had never worked in film. It was always a problem. It got so bad I had to hire a professional for The Other Side, but that was expensive. So when I met Nancy she took over the sound. We were traveling companions and lovers. We’ve been together 48 years. She’s a quiet person, and was the perfect sound recordist. You don’t want a chatty sound person. [Laughs.] It’s a technical job, and I like to control the conversations with my subjects.
One thing that’s interesting, as it relates to Nancy and Willie, is that I don’t think Willie ever had a girlfriend—he was a very paranoid person—but he loved the attention he got from this pretty young sound girl. In Willie, when he’s sitting under the bridge singing, he’s actually singing to Nancy who is just off camera. It’s so heartfelt. And at the end of the film, when he’s brought out in chains, he jumped up and said, “Hey, Nancy! Hey, Danny!” I think she brought a lot to the films.
NOTEBOOK: How did your publishing and production company Bleak Beauty come about?
LYON: Nancy and I met and married in 1978. Not long after I tried to get a book of mine called The Paper Negative published through the same publisher that did Conversations with the Dead, but they declined. So that introduced me to the world of self-publishing. We financed the book ourselves and called the company Bleak Beauty. At the time we were living on Chrystie Street in New York, which was horrific, with shootings and killings and prostitution in the building and in the park across the street. “Bleak beauty” was a reference to the view from our loft, which was all abandoned buildings. The next film we made, Born to Film (1982), was the first Bleak Beauty film, and everything since has been released under that banner. Turns out Dickens’s greatest work was Bleak House, but I had never read it, or to my knowledge heard of it. Often in searches people think we are a beauty parlor.
NOTEBOOK: Can you tell me a little about the original context in which your films were shown? I can’t find much information online about screenings, festivals, or premieres.
LYON: Well, that’s because I eventually just gave up. Willie, for example, was a film that I thought we could distribute. So we started by applying to festivals, but that was an expensive process. We had to ship the film prints, and submission fees were probably $100; then they’d reject the film and you wouldn’t get that money back. But then there was interest from the USA Film Festival (now Sundance) in Utah, so we submitted it. And a programmer called me up to tell me how much he loved the film, but that they couldn’t show it. So I said, “Well, why don’t you just show it?” And he said, “Because no one will come.”
Eventually I decided to get them out on VHS. A friend of mine transferred all the films to 1-inch video, which was the standard for PBS at the time. And then from there we made 3/4-inch masters, which were then transferred to 1/2-inch home video. So three generations later they looked like absolute shit. But we made these beautiful VHS covers for them, which have been preserved and which were part of the Whitney show. We would sell these tapes, and sometimes a school would buy the whole set for like $1000. But otherwise we didn’t sell many. In general the films have shown during exhibitions of my photographic work.
SNCC (2020).
NOTEBOOK: SNCC is the first of your films to really utilize and look back on your photography. Were you resistant to that in the past, and what made you want to revisit this period now?
LYON: I was resistant. SNCC is made up almost entirely of still photos, and I made it after spending a lifetime saying, “I’m making movies now, not stills.” And there’s narration in the film, which I was also against, thinking nothing interesting could be done with voiceover.
The truth is: it was my books and probably twenty photos that made my name. No one looks at the other pictures, including me. When you shoot with a 35mm still camera you get 36 pictures, and if you’re really good one will be worth saving. So that’s 35 outtakes from each roll. I had probably 3,500 outtakes from the civil rights movement, which just sat around for fifty years. It wasn’t until scanning was invented that I was able to look at these pictures on a computer. So technology made SNCC possible.
NOTEBOOK: A lot of the issues dealt with in your films are still sadly relevant. Do you think as your films are seen more widely that they can offer viewers any insights into the contemporary sociopolitical landscape?
LYON: Of course. These issues are omnipresent. Take climate change. New Mexico is on fire right now—a quarter of a million acres are burning. There’s a fire thirty miles outside my window—I can see the smoke. There’s even a fire in Las Vegas, New Mexico that was started by the federal government intentionally, which “got out of hand,” I’ll say. Now it’s the biggest fire in the state’s history.
I was lucky to have been a part of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a great historical event. It was bigger than Occupy, it was bigger than the War in Afghanistan. It affected the whole world, which is kind of remarkable. But fast forward to climate change and I’m looking around like, “What’s going on?” And the answer is almost nothing is going on. In the summer of 1963, during the Civil Rights era, 14,000 people were arrested. That is not happening with climate change activism.
One of the last reviews Todd Gitlin wrote before he passed away was about a book of mine, American Blood, and he mentioned how he couldn’t think of another social movement where a single photographer was so identified with images of that movement. That’s one reason I made SNCC. I thought if I make a film with these photos then I can perhaps inspire people with a model of how to attack climate change. SNCC is that model. The only answer to the right wing grab of power in America is massive strikes, and demonstrations in the streets. SNCC did that. And it did it non-violently.
I devoted thirty years of my life to making films after I quit photo-journalism. I used to think that period of my life was a failure, because nobody saw the films. But I’d like to think that the films will survive for the very reason that I made them: to record the humanity that existed here in the Americas. The films preserve a humanity that existed in these people, who have struggled in life, or were on the dark side of things, and who “the media" never paid much attention to. Right now at this moment, for the first time in my lifetime or anyone’s lifetime, the very idea of American democracy is being questioned. What is going to hold this country together? It’s not religion. Religion is something from the middle ages. We have made a new world and we need a new government, and the only thing that can unite everyone, make us believe in each other, even our supposed enemies, is empathy. That’s the cement of a real democracy. It sounds corny, but it simply comes down to loving each other, and all the respect that comes with that. Having said that, I think the non-violent movements have to get much more aggressive, and that the crisis and threats to the planet justifies the most extreme actions to save it.