© Danny Lyon, Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ
Photographer Danny Lyon will discuss his exhibition, Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and his family history. His experience with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), would shape and dictate the course of his career. He has dedicated himself to chronicling social movements, working across mediums, including books, blogs, photography and documentaries. I am a realist, he writes, meaning I believe in the power of the camera, documents and reality.
A giant of post-War documentary photography and film, Brooklyn, NY native Danny Lyon helped define a mode of photojournalism in which the picture-maker is deeply and personally embedded in his subject matter. A self-taught photographer and a graduate of the University of Chicago, Lyon began his photographic career in the early 1960s as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a national group of college students who joined together after the first sit-in by four African American college students at a North Carolina lunch counter. From 1963 to 1964, between arrests and police beatings, Lyon traveled the South and Mid-Atlantic regions documenting the Civil Rights Movement.
