When he was 21, Danny Lyon's father passed on to him a 1953 Oldsmobile. He discovered the ecstasy of speeding along Georgia highways during the civil rights movement, with red dirt fields of peanuts and cotton flying by. In the excitement of driving, he realized his own mortality. Lyon's Junk: America in Ruins is a book of pictures of 86 American cars, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, made in the junkyards of the western United States. The pictures were taken in Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma. This is a work of pure visual photography. The premise behind the work is that many things—sculptures, monuments, buildings—take on a new and added beauty as they deteriorate and become ruins: a certain pathos is added to their original beauty. This is true of the automobiles in this series: once the beloved machines of people and families who owned and drove them, they now evoke a terrible beauty and sadness.
Danny Lyon (born 1942 in New York) is one of the most influential documentary photographers. While still a student at the University of Chicago he was jailed in the South and became the first staff photographer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). His photographs made up 75% of the pictures in the book The Movement. He returned to Chicago in 1965 and joined the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. His two-year stint with the club resulted in the seminal book, The Bikeriders. In 1967 Lyon obtained access to the Texas prison system and produced the series Conversations with the Dead. On completing his prison work Lyon returned to New York, where he met the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Together they formed a company called Sweeney Films.
