Beschreibung:

Danny Lyon (born 1942)Selected images from "Conversations with the Dead", 1967 19 gelatin silver prints, each signed in pencil on the verso. (19) each approximately 8 x 11 3/4in (20.3 x 29.8cm) or the reverse sheet 11 x 14in (35.5 x 28cm) FootnotesIn 1967, Danny Lyon drove from his home in New York to Huntsville, Texas, where, over the course of 14 months, he visited and photographed seven penitentiaries. The director of the Texas Department of Corrections granted Lyon full access to the prisons, which housed a range of prisoners: Some, like the Walls and Ramsey, were for the general population. Others, like Ellis, were where the most dangerous lived. The resulting images were a poignant, personal look at the daily lives of the inmates. "This work was from the beginning an effort to somehow emotionally convey the spirit of imprisonment shared by 250,000 men in the United States," Lyon writes in a foreword to his 1971 book "Conversations with the Dead." "The resulting work is not meant to be seen as a study of the Texas Department of Corrections. Had I been given the opportunity, I could have made an analogous work in any of the fifty-one American prison systems." "I was never afraid of the men," Lyon said in an interview. "I like them. And I had many friends inside the system that would stand up for me, dangerous men. Anyway, in my heart of hearts I felt I was doing something good for the men, and most of them knew it." Lyon continued, "I've tried with whatever power I had to make this pictures of imprisonment as distressing as it is in reality. The few times I doubted the wisdom of my attitude, I had only to visit someone in his cell to straighten out my mind. And the material collected here doesn't approach for a moment the feeling you get standing for two minutes in the corridor of Ellis." Literature Lyon, Conversations with the Dead, Holt, 1971, all images reproduced.