A new book by photographer Danny Lyon explores the beauty of once-beloved, now-decaying cars found in junkyards across America. A work of pure visual photography, Junk: America in Ruins – published by Damiani Books – features images of more than 80 American cars, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, that Lyon discovered in forgotten junkyards on travels through Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma.
Lyon is one of the most influential photographers of the last six decades and a key figure of New Journalism, whose immersive and groundbreaking works include The Bikeriders (1968), The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), and the memoir This Is My Life I’m Talking About (Damiani Books, 2024).
When Lyon was 21, his father bequeathed 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.
The premise behind Junk 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.
“One of the things that has always made Danny’s work powerful and compellingly unpredictable for me is his ability to hold contradictory ideas in his mind—in fact, not only to hold them but to find the profoundly, painfully human in their incongruity. As he and Nancy, his wife, wandered America in their Tesla looking for seductive junkyards, I can almost hear him ranting about the thousands of wrecks along their route as a shameful testament to a century of wanton pollution, the physical predicate to the planet’s nosedive toward uninhabitability. Then I can see him getting out of the car and wandering through the yards during the golden hour, exulting in the surfaces and shapes and endless accidents of physical beauty that his eye can’t help but find, whether in a civil-rights battle or a Chicago tenement or a filthy Houston tattoo parlor.” – Randy Kennedy, in the introduction to Junk: America in Ruins
Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942 and raised in Queens. As a student at the University of Chicago he joined the civil rights movement, becoming the first staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He is a photojournalist, writer, and filmmaker. His non-fiction books include The Bikeriders, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, Conversations with the Dead, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Like a Thief’s Dream and American Blood.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography and later in filmmaking. In 1990 he received a Rockefeller Fellowship in filmmaking and in 2011 the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism. In 2016 he had a major retrospective (Message to the Future) at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2023 his exhibition Danny Lyon: Journey West was at the Albuquerque
Museum. A 2024 feature film of “The Bikeriders” was directed by Jeff Nichols and starred Austin Butler, Jody Comer, and Tom Hardy. Lyon’s work can be seen online at bleakbeauty.com and http://instagram.com/dannylyonphotos2
Danny Lyon : Junk : America in Ruins
Damiani Books
Prix : 35 £ – 40 €
www.damianibooks.com
