“When I signed in, I wrote, ‘Danny Lyon, Visitor.’ As to purpose of visit, I wrote, ‘Spy.’”
Photographer Danny Lyon’s immersive style of practice furthered the development of ‘New Journalism’ within the photographic community and is characteristic of his lifelong interest in documenting the overlooked and outcast. In 1967 and 1968 he spent fourteen months in seven Texas prisons photographing the harsh, degrading, and monotonous routine of incarceration, capturing inmates serving all levels of sentencing, including death row. The resulting images were published in Lyon’s book Conversations with the Dead in 1971. During his time photographing in the prisons, he formed relationships with individual prisoners and earned their trust. An early lithographic version of the series was made in the print shop of The Walls penitentiary, the work supervised by inmate James ‘Smiley’ Renton. Taken as a whole, Conversations with the Dead is a document that encompasses both the personal and the institutional. Although made over 50 years ago, it has lost none of its relevance to the American carceral system. Long out of print, Conversations with the Dead was reissued by Phaidon in 2015.
