This World Is Not My Home: Danny Lyon Photographs

Back in the early 1960s, Lyon found a way of practicing traditional photojournalism on his own terms.

The Menil Collection, Houston

Through July 29

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He was just getting started, said Tyler Rudick in CultureMap.com. In the middle of the ’60s, Lyon documented the demolition of the neighborhood that was cleared to create the World Trade Center, then joined a notorious motorcycle gang, the Chicago Outlaws, as a way to capture their world. Next came perhaps his most famous project—the book Conversations With the Dead, an inside look at Texas prisons. This time, Lyon believed that he could destroy the penal system with his images, only to watch the U.S. population behind bars multiply instead. But at 70, Lyon hasn’t noticeably slowed down, making it his business to document the Occupy Wall Street movement and to continue photographing the marginalized. The social consciousness in his work makes a photograph like 2011’s Men Drying Clothes, Bernalillo, NM “as charged and relevant” as the images with which he made his name.