Danny Lyon Retrospective: The Seventh Dog

This unconventional monograph of the work of photographer, writer, and filmmaker Lyon (Deep Sea Diver) is a revealing hybrid memoir in text and images. Lyon is known for his powerful pictures of SNCC’s activities during the civil rights movement, portraits of murderers in Texas prisons, documentation of adventures with motorcycle gangs, cataloguing of the changes to Lower Manhattan in the 1960s, and capturing Mohammed Ali in 1970 on the eve of his return to boxing after being banned for avoiding the draft. In addition, Lyon incorporated his own persona into his reporting in the mode of New Journalism contemporaries. Lyon’s narration eschews strict chronology in favor of a recursive approach that accounts for people he’s known, places he’s lived, projects he’s worked on, and what he’s lost along the way. Reproductions of his striking photographs are interspersed with collages of documents and images, as well as evocative writing about the personal, political, and professional moments that defined his career. “What motivated the documentarian in me,” Lyon writes, “was death; the struggle to survive, to speak to the future and the unborn, and to carry what is called the past into the future.” Both a retrospective and a final mission statement, the book is obsessed with loss while insisting on the beauty, joy, and hope in what remains. 200 color and b&w illus. (Apr.)