Knave of Hearts

Color/B&W 141 p. Case only. Twin Palms, 1999 ($60.00)

This is Lyon's major new work, many years in the making, publishing for the first time his extensive use of photomontage, and reproduced gorgeously by Twin Palms. Probably his most beautiful book.

"Claiming the same credibility for his personal images as for his more conventional documentary pictures, he has made some of his most political and most moving work to date."
Nan Goldin "Doing Life", Artforum, Sept. 1995

"Photographer Lyon has created a photosensitive autobiography formed of photos, and narrative text. The combined effort takes hold and transforms the project into a kind of documentary analysis of the pleasures of seeing and adventure without loss to it's surprising intimacy. Powerful."
Strand Review

"an autobiography in words and montages from one of the preeminent documentary artists of our generation..... he helped into being the profound changes wrought by the early, heroic civil rights movement, (Lyon was the first staff photographer for SNCC), and the recognition of the outsider and social outcast as an individual worthy of honest attention"
Richard Gordon for Hungryminds.com

"I was inspired, moved, delighted, brought to reach, and sometimes overwhelmed traveling through the encapsulated journey of your life, shown and told so beautifully."
Jennifer Durant

Available directly from Twin Palms, Post Office Box 10229, Sante Fe, New Mexico, 87505, 800-797 -0680 (www.twinpalms.com), Also A Photographers Place, NYC (212-966-2356), Edwynn Houk Gallery (212-750-7070), A Gallery of Fine Photography (504-568-1313)

Knave of Hearts Review
BY STEPHEN LONGMIRE
Originally published in DoubleTake Magazine, Fall 2000

In the mid-1990s, nearly twenty years after his parents died and their house in New York City was sold, photographer Danny Lyon returned to his childhood home as it was being sold again. As if in a dream, he found relics of his own tenancy still inside. “ Upstairs inside a walk-in closet was a pile of my earliest prints, which I had mounted on black mat boards in 1962. The porcelain tub I had bathed in as a child had been removed from the third floor and put in the basement. In the tub were a couple of large plastic garbage bags filled with books, many of which I had used in college.”

So begins Knave of Hearts, Lyon’s new memoir, which combines text and collages--or montages, as the occasional filmmaker prefers to call them--of his own photographs. The message is clear enough: this book came out of the same time warp that allowed him to reenter his childhood home. The house had become a time capsule for him, filled with the smaller time capsules of his earliest photographs and thoughts. In Lyon’s montages, his father’s photographic archive is interspersed with his own, illustrating how our parents’ memories become an annex to our own.

Since college, Lyon has photographed in the public arena, often for political cause, however personal it may have seemed, while his father photographed strictly for personal reasons. To the younger Lyon, all of these photographs are snapshots now, crystallized memories showing the chance occurrences that have made his life meaningful. His father’s memories fill out the blank spaces in his own. With these photographs, the most recent of which show his own children, Lyon pieces his life together like a jigsaw puzzle. Knave of Hearts shows what photographs can mean to their creator, which is seldom what they mean to others. Instead of the family of man, this is one man’s family, a closetful for his descendants to discover—those he knows, and those he doesn’t.

He observes his grandmother’s likeness to his own daughter, now a grown woman. He looks on both of them with a father’s tenderness and mourns the relatives who died before he could know them. “They all look at me as if I was in the room with them,” he writes, “as if I was making the photograph.” This is the paradox Roland Barthes observes in his book Camera Lucida when, studying Alexander Gardner’s photograph of a doomed young man, he muses, “He is dead and he is going to die.” The photograph remains in the present tense, as photographs always do, long after its subject had vanished into the past. Lyon raises the dead by imagining he has photographed them himself. He watches over his grandmother, and she watches over him.

Snapshots typically mean everything to someone, and very little to anyone else. It’s not easy to make snapshots that appeal to a broad audience, but that’s how Lyon made his name in the sixties. His photographs of the civil rights movement, collected in The Movement(1964) and Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement(1992), remain vital first-person documents of their time. By Lyon has never been satisfied being a photojournalist. Knave of Hearts attempts to reintegrate these and other projects into the ongoing narrative of his life. “As the years turned into decades,” he explains “I came to believe that by combining [my photographs] and bringing in elements of color and details of place and time, I could make something more evocative than any single picture.”

Lyon’s work has always been about making outsiders part of his family. In his introduction to The Bikeriders (1968; reissued by Twin Palms Press in 1997), his celebrated portrait of the Outlaws, a motorcycle racing club he briefly joined in Chicago, Lyon describes his photography as “a personal record.” The propaganda photographs he made for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early years of the civil rights movement were also about crossing line and taking sides.

Disenchanted with mainstream coverage of the movement and of the phenomenon of the sixties, Lyon attempted “a new kind of photojournalism” that made no pretense to objectivity or political neutrality. “Participatory journalism,” as George Plimpton called it, required joining up, occupying your subject’s position. “The most unsafe place to be,” Lyon argues in Knave of Hearts, “whether people are using rocks or bullets, is between the lines. You must choose a side, if for no other reason than to have a firm spot on which to stand and a moment’s peace to focus.” Photographing helped him take his stand and enlarged his experience. “As a child I had been afraid of so many things,” he recalls, “but as soon as I held a camera in my hand, I began to expose myself to the very things that were foreign to me and that I had always feared.”

Previously unpublished outtakes from The Bikeriders and its two “sequels” –The Destruction of Lower Manhattan(1969) and Conversations with the Dead(1971)—accompany Lyon’s pithy accounts of these projects in Knave of Hearts. Together, the three early books form a loosely linked study of American machismo, at once sympathetic and unsparingly critical. The Bikeriders commemorates a risky form of lower-class white rebellion; the demolition men in The Destruction of Lower Manhattan are seen tearing down block after block of historic New York to clear room for a World Trade Center that was unlikely to benefit them; Conversations with the Dead depicts predominately white prisoners behind The Walls, the oldest prison run by the Texas Department of Corrections, and includes prison records and letters in which Lyon’s newfound friends describe their experiences “inside.” In Knave of Hearts, Lyon writes of his preoccupation with demolition derbies in the late 1980s: “The whole thing seemed so wonderfully American, almost a parody of our civilization going down in ruins.” He works with his heart on his sleeve and his tongue in his cheek.

Jailed in 1966 after the antiwar march on the Pentagon, Lyon shared a cell with “a young man in a serape, his gentle, dreamy eyes glowing as if he were far away. ‘Do you think we’ll have a revolution?’ he kept asking, as if saying it could make it true…a revolution in Berkeley, a revolution in Forest Hills? I asked myself, how could that happen? ‘Do you think we’ll have a revolution?’ he asked once again. He was talking to himself. Then he said, ‘We’ve already had a revolution.’” At first it seems a bitter irony, like so much in Lyon’s work. Then it becomes clear the young man in Latin American garb is right. America had its revolution, but the victory is still being won.