Danny Lyon

A conversation with Julian Bond and Congressman John Lewis January 8th and 9th, 2013

El Mojado focuses on an undocumented worker from rural Chihuahua whom Lyon came to regard as “a genius.” Every spring Lyon would meet him near the border and smuggle him past the border patrol into the United States. Eddie introduced Lyon to the whole unbelievable world of “illegal aliens.”

Willie is a realistic film made in Bernalillo, home of Willie Jaramillo and filmmakers Danny and Nancy Weiss Lyon. Defiantly individual and implaccable in the face of authority, Willie is repeatedly thrown into jail, at first for relatively minor offenses. The filmmakers gain access to jail cells, day rooms, lunatic wards, and the worst cellblock in the penitentiary, where Willie is locked up next to his childhood friend and convicted murderer, Michael Guzman.

Danny Lyon takes an existential look at himself, the nature of his work and the vast emptiness of his home, the American South West.

The prequel to Lyon’s Born to Film and Two Fathers, his two previous “family” films, this film covers the years 1942-56. Shot entirely on 8mm by Lyon’s father, Dr. Ernst F. Lyon, the remarkable footage was edited by Lyon in 2016. Beginning in 1942, the footage documents the artist’s birth and his father’s departure to Utah during WWII. The great blizzard of 1946 is shown in Queens, as is the 1950 LIRR Thanksgiving railroad crash, an event witnessed by Lyon as a child, and shown here via Fox News footage. Ends with the artist at 14, as his father films his grandfather’s 80th birthday party. “Opa” walks off with a cane, an homage to Chaplin, and ending with the only close-up in the film, a yellow rose.

As more and more Americans become robots, Lyon searches for the soul of Amerika, and finds this....

A conversation with Julian Bond and Congressman John Lewis January 8th and 9th, 2013

El Mojado focuses on an undocumented worker from rural Chihuahua whom Lyon came to regard as “a genius.” Every spring Lyon would meet him near the border and smuggle him past the border patrol into the United States. Eddie introduced Lyon to the whole unbelievable world of “illegal aliens.”

Willie is a realistic film made in Bernalillo, home of Willie Jaramillo and filmmakers Danny and Nancy Weiss Lyon. Defiantly individual and implaccable in the face of authority, Willie is repeatedly thrown into jail, at first for relatively minor offenses. The filmmakers gain access to jail cells, day rooms, lunatic wards, and the worst cellblock in the penitentiary, where Willie is locked up next to his childhood friend and convicted murderer, Michael Guzman.

Danny Lyon takes an existential look at himself, the nature of his work and the vast emptiness of his home, the American South West.

The prequel to Lyon’s Born to Film and Two Fathers, his two previous “family” films, this film covers the years 1942-56. Shot entirely on 8mm by Lyon’s father, Dr. Ernst F. Lyon, the remarkable footage was edited by Lyon in 2016. Beginning in 1942, the footage documents the artist’s birth and his father’s departure to Utah during WWII. The great blizzard of 1946 is shown in Queens, as is the 1950 LIRR Thanksgiving railroad crash, an event witnessed by Lyon as a child, and shown here via Fox News footage. Ends with the artist at 14, as his father films his grandfather’s 80th birthday party. “Opa” walks off with a cane, an homage to Chaplin, and ending with the only close-up in the film, a yellow rose.

As more and more Americans become robots, Lyon searches for the soul of Amerika, and finds this....

“Danny and Nancy Lyon’s ‘Media Man’ is a documentary in search of the truth. . . totally honest and very funny.” - Phillip Brockman, Curator of Media Arts, The Concoran Gallery of Art

Shot in 1974 by Danny Lyon and a single audio person, in twenty days in Santa Marta Colombia. The film shows the daily rhythms of a gang of boys who live on the city’s streets. Their survival skills and errant lifestyles are in evidence as they beg for scraps to eat, wheel and deal with storekeepers and street vendors, and play together.

Named for the atomic bomb built in New Mexico and dropped on Hiroshima, this is Lyon’s portrait of late-70s New Mexico – a look beneath the Sunbelt.

Llanito is the first of Lyon’s trio of films shot in and around Bernalillo, New Mexico, and it is also the screen debut of Willie Jaramillo. The twelve-year-old boy acts as a guiding force for Lyon and his audience, reading out the names on gravestones and relating the stories of the people buried there. He is the focal point of a group of mostly young men with whom Lyon would remain friends and continue to document for the next several decades. The film meanders through the town and among its inhabitants, passing between groups of people at times with the keen instinct of a desert eagle and at others in a drunken stupor, stumbling from one scene into the next with the visceral and irrational inevitability of a gravitational pull.

Filmed and recorded by Danny Lyon, and edited by Anne Barliant, Murderers tells the story of five murderers in three different states.

The child star of BORN TO FILM, Raphael, is now a twenty-seven year old who returns to his fathers farm to plant corn and “experience fatherhood”. Intercut as a film that takes place in the world of Germany in the 1920’s, and Queens, of the 1940’s, as Dr. Ernst Lyon’s remarkable album photographs bring to life worlds long gone. Time is collapsed. “Two Fathers” is a filmic meditation on life, age, family and death.

A Comedy in which the artist's voice has been replaced by Gene Autry's. Lyon's homage to his friend, sculptor Mark di Suvero. From footage shot in 1965 and 1975.

Danny Lyon's SNCC (2020), brings together hundreds of never-before-seen black-and-white photographs made by Lyon during the years that he was employed as the staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Beginning in 1962 in Cairo, Illinois when Lyon, then a University of Chicago student, met John Lewis, Freedom Rider, the film traces the story of their friendship alongside the ongoing struggle for civil rights in the United States. The images are layered with archival audio recordings of speeches by and conversations with Lewis, Julian Bond, and Dotty Zellner, among others, as well as freedom songs that were recorded by Alan Ribback in churches and meetings in Atlanta in the 1960s and recently rediscovered by Lyon.

A family album from the visionary photojournalist Danny Lyon traces three generations of image-makers.

In the summer of 1963 15,000 African Americans are arrested across the South. Many of the protesters are high school students. In southwest Georgia fifteen high school girls are held in the Leesburg Stockade. Some are there for two months.

Deep in Mexico two brothers sit in a plaza discussing a broken fuel pump. In a few days they will leave for work. With their father and some friends they will ride a bus 1,300 miles north and enter the United States by walking through the desert. They call America “El Otro Lado,” the other side.

A follow-up to the “New Mexico trilogy” – Lyon revisiting some of the subjects of his past work, in particular the family of Willie Jaramillo, who first appeared in Lyon’s Llanito (1971) and later became the protagonist of the feature-length documentary, Willie (1985). Willie died in the Sandoval County jail in Bernalillo in 1992, and here his family members and friends – including Willie’s younger brother Ferney, Ferney’s friend Dennis Baca, his sister Gloria, and his niece Janice – speak candidly and emotionally about Willie, and about the tragedies and struggles of their own lives

A "comedy in a Houston tattoo parlour during the Vietnam war"-- In reality, a vérité-style documentary centered around Bill Sanders's 'painless' tattoo shop. Various clients are highlighted, and Sanders spouts his unique brand of wisdom.