Danny Lyon
[Photographer, b. 1942, New York, lives in Ulster County, New York.]
The sign at the entrance to my gym locker room says, “no cell phones please, cell phones are cameras.” They are not. A camera is a Nikon or a Leica or Rolleiflex, and when you strike someone with one, they know they have been hit with something substantial.
The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble.
[The people who run things] are so successful in the way they do it now. They could buy me off with a couple of vintage prints, they could have you do an ad, or give you a ribbon... In capitalist countries they reward artists because we’re ineffectual.
I feel totally responsible for what I see. I feel totally responsible for what I photograph.
The pictures do not ask you to “help” these people, but something much more difficult; to be briefly, intensely aware of their existence, an existence as real and significant as your own.
I wanted to change history and preserve humanity. But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.
You put a camera in my hand, I want to get close to people. Not physically close, emotionally close, all of it. It’s part of the process. It’s a very weird thing being a photographer.
I was a bike rider, a photographer and a history student, probably in that order.
(On his early years)
