This Is My Life I'm Talking About

Damiani, 2024. First edition.
Hardcover, 224 pp., 34 illustrations. Photographs and text by Danny Lyon.

'This Is My Life I'm Talking About' by Danny Lyon is a picaresque memoir written from inside the heart of the revolutionary twentieth century by one of its most crucial witnesses. A love story of a beautiful friendship with the great American hero John Lewis. Danny Lyon writes with the tremendous and generous feeling, humor, and a selection of unpublished and unseen pictures ties in Danny Lyon’s life to 'The Bikeriders'. His story begins in Russia under the Czar, when in 1905 Lyon’s uncle Abram is involved in the murder of a policeman during a pogrom and fled to Brooklyn, where, during World War Two, Lyon was born.

Danny Lyon (New York, 1942) is one of the most influential documentary photographers of the last six decades. While still a student at the University of Chicago he was jailed in the South and became the first staff photographer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). His photographers made up 75% of the pictures in the book The Movement. He returned to Chicago in 1965 and joined the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. His two-year stint with the club resulted in the seminal book, The Bikeriders. In 1967 Lyon obtained access to the Texas prison system and produced the series Conversations with the Dead. On completing his prison work Lyon returned to New York, where he met the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Together they formed a company called Sweeney Films. The movie, The Bikeriders, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Jeff Nichols and inspired by Lyon’s photographs and the words he recorded, was released on December 1st, 2023 in the USA. The trailer received 25 million views.