Danny Lyon's Out of "This World"

Moving photos at The Menil Collection make us yearn for more.

Comments (0) By Kelly Klaasmeyer Wednesday, May 16 2012

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Lyon's prison photos, such as Shakedown, Ramsey Unit, are some of the strongest in the show.

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The Menil Collection

1515 Sul Ross
Houston, TX 77006

Category: Galleries

Region: Montrose

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"This World Is Not My Home: Danny Lyon Photographs"

Through July 29. The Menil Collection, 1533 Sul Ross, 713-525-9400.

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The hard thing about the show as a whole is that it's such a small slice of a huge body of work. Lyon has made an enormous number of films as well. (One of them, Los Niños Abandonados, made in 1975 and restored in 2012, was a film about Colombian street children originally funded by Dominique de Menil and rescreened in conjunction with the current exhibition.) Lyon tells stories, and the photos excerpted from the artists' books make you feel like you are stepping into the middle of a story. They make you want more. I wanted to see all of the photographs and have the images build on themselves. Making things more difficult, most of the books aren't easy to come by. The Bikeriders and Conversations with the Dead are out of print and pricey. Early editions of The Bikeriders are at least a couple grand, and a 2003 reissue still runs a couple hundred bucks on Amazon.

But "This World Is Not My Home" gives you a nice sense of Lyon and his work. Sometimes there are artists who work with social and political justice issues who give you the feeling that the work isn't ultimately about those issues. It's really about the artist and how noble he is. You don't get that with Lyon. He is involved with the world, his subject matter and his subjects because he truly cares about them. And that makes all the difference.