Return from the Fields [Conversations with the Dead]

Date1968-1969

Credit LineGift of Dr. Stephen Nicholas

Dimensions11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm)

Object number2014.048.018

Label Text“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.” -Danny Lyon, foreword to Conversations with the Dead, 1971

Widely acclaimed as Danny Lyon’s most significant body of work, Conversations with the Dead offers a rare glimpse into the lives of the incarcerated. Prior to embarking upon this project, Lyon had completed his series on civil rights in the South, The Movement, while a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He also published The Bikeriders, an admittedly romanticized collection of photographs taken while Lyon was a member of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. His immersive approach has been characterized as a photographic version of the “new journalism” of Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote infused with an insistent social conscience and emphasis on activism.

Perhaps because of his participatory approach and his prior experiences (he himself was arrested several times) Lyon recognized the injustices within the American correctional system and the inhumane conditions of mass incarceration. In 1967, he requested and received permission from the Director of the Texas Department of Corrections, Dr. George Beto, to photograph life inside six separate prisons. These included The Walls, the oldest prison in Texas, named for the massive sandstone and brick walls surrounding it; Ellis, a prison farm that housed inmates who have been deemed the most dangerous and uncontrollable; and Ramsey, an enormous prison farm located thirty miles south of Houston, occupying the land of five former plantations.

Ever an activist and advocate, Lyon spent most of his time on the line, where he documented the harsh labor conditions and severe heat exhaustion suffered by inmates. He often composed these photographs around strong diagonal groupings—a crowded work wagon or exhausted inmates returning from the fields—that merge individual inmates into a single form so that one is indistinguishable from another, subtly relating an experience of erasure and loss of identity.

Lyon’s inmate portraits and interior shots counterbalance his photographs of unidentifiable prisoners dotting cotton fields. Although he rarely names his subjects, Lyon captures individual and humanizing characteristics—prison tattoos, the mélange of chosen objects in an inmate’s cell, the distinctive flick of a wrist as a sleeve is rolled, or a particular brooding stare. The “poet of the underdog,” as inmate Billy McCune called him, Lyon restored lie and dignity to these forgotten men by confirming their existence in images.

Conversations with the Dead was first titled “Born to Lose” and was printed as a portfolio by inmates working in the print shop of The Walls. Inmate James Renton (called Smiley), who had learned both offset printing and lithography while incarcerated at a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma, supervised the project. When the project was later published as a book, Lyon added the prison records and writings of select inmates, including James Renton, with whom he had formed a bond. Lyon remarks in the foreword, “They are the heroes of this book. I knew each of them as well as a free man can.”
Exhibition HistoryTestament: Danny Lyon Photographs, Michael C. Carlos Museum, October 10 - January 17, 2021
Published ReferencesDanny Lyon, Conversations with the Dead: Photographs of Prison Life with the Letters and Drawings of Billy McCune #122054 (London: Phaidon Press, 2015), 113.

ProvenanceEx coll. Stephen Nicholas, United States, purchased ca. 2003-2011.

Status

Not on view

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