While Phaidon recently published a reverse retrospective of Danny Lyon that looks back at the photojournalist’s career beginning with his most recent series, Aperture and Xavier Barral are publishing a new edition of his legendary odyssey along America’s highways with underground motorcycle gangs,The Bikeriders. It was the first example of the immersive documentary, brief and intense, which helped Lyon make a name for himself. “In the early period, I did so much in a very short time span—about seven years. I started in Albany, Georgia, with the civil rights movement and came out the other end with the Texas prison system—with SNCC, the Outlaws, and Lower Manhattan in between,” Lyon told Susan Meiselas in a 2010 interview for Bomb. “I was in my twenties during the entire time. When I was done, I was done with photography. I didn’t see any more worlds to conquer or a way to make a better photography book than Conversations with the Dead, so I came out here to New Mexico. I’m still out here in exactly the same spot. And when I left, I never looked back. I didn’t go visit those people, I didn’t call them. I used them as subjects, as a journalist, then I moved on. Can you imagine? I leave SNCC in late 1964 and within two years I’m a member of an Outlaw motorcycle group that goes on a picnic and has a nine-foot original Nazi flag marking the spot. And I’m one of these guys?”
The Bikeriders is a full-throttle travelogue about bikes, booze and discontent written by the members of the Chicago Outlaws. They talk shop and big wheels with Cal, Funny Sonny, Zipco Cockroach and Bobby Goodpaster. They cruise down the highway at 90 miles an hour, swallowing live caterpillars for laughs, intoxicated by the risks they take and the alcohol they consume. Lyon rolled with them from 1965 to 1966, back when they were still as proud and free and the legendary rebels of the movies: “The biker world as I knew it in the early days was always having to deal with new restrictions and media scrutiny. If they shot The Wild One today, Brando and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club would all be wearing helmets,” writes Lyon in the introduction.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
http://exb.fr/en/133-the-bikeriders.html
http://aperture.org/shop/danny-lyon-the-bikeriders-books
http://bleakbeauty.com/home.html
http://dektol.wordpress.com/
http://bombmagazine.org/article/6620/
