He'll be at Hollywood Theatre July 18 for a screening of his groundbreaking films ‘Willie’ and ‘Murderers’
After five years of correspondence, local artist Vanessa Renwick has convinced her favorite photographer to come to Portland and screen two of his films.
Danny Lyon, 76, is well-known for capturing pivotal moments during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in photographs, as well as for embedding himself within various subcultures in order to capture his subjects on film. The result was an unparalleled record of subversive Americana in the 20th century.
He was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the younger, more radical branch of the Civil Rights Movement that was instrumental in direct actions such as the Freedom Rides. And in 2016, it was Lyon’s photos of Bernie Sanders at a 1962 Chicago University sit-in that surfaced during the campaign. Lyon also famously joined the Chicago Outlaws, a motorcycle gang, in order to photograph its members for his collection, “The Bikeriders,” published in 1968.
More recently, he published a book on climate change called “Burn Zone,” which details the degradation he’s witnessed in New Mexico – as well as all the contact information, including addresses and phone numbers, of people he deems responsible, such as the Koch brothers.
But it is Lyon’s portrayal of men living within the walls of America’s prisons and jails that Renwick has worked diligently to bring to Portland.
At 7:30 p.m. on July 18 “Willie” (1985) and “Murderers” (2005) will screen at Hollywood Theatre , located at 4122 NE Sandy Blvd. Following the screening, Lyon and Renwick – each a firebrand in their own right – will lead the audience in what’s likely to be a provocative discussion.
“Murderers” is a 30-minute film featuring interviews with five men convicted of murder, and “Willie” is an 82-minute film profiling Willie Jaramillo, a childlike man who bounces between a life of substance use and time in jail for low-level offenses. This fall, its sequel, “Wanderer,” featuring Willie’s younger brother Ferny, will premier in New York.
Renwick selected “Murderers” and “Willie” for their cinematic beauty and empathy-producing qualities, she said. They also share a common thread: Michael Guzman, Willie’s childhood friend, was a convicted murderer featured in both films.
These works followed Lyon’s first foray into the prison system in 1967 and 1968, when he spent 14 months inside the Texas penal system to produce the book “Conversations with the Dead.”
The event is co-sponsored by Renwick’s production company, The Oregon Department of Kick Ass , and the Portland Museum of Modern Art.
Lyon spoke to Street Roots from his home in Bernalillo, N.M., a town with fewer than 9,000 residents that lies about 10 miles north of Albuquerque just east of the Rio Grande. It’s also where “Willie” was filmed.
Emily Green: Many of your images are now considered historic. Do you think these films carry a different message today than they did in earlier decades?
Danny Lyon: If you want to send a message, go to Western Union. Do you know what that’s from? I don’t know the director – it’s from Hollywood.
I don’t think I make message films. But I did hope to destroy the prison system.
“Murderers” is about guys who either murdered someone or were convicted of murder, and it does try to humanize them because you don’t meet people like this. I liked these people; they were very interesting. Some of them I knew well, some of them I didn’t.
“Willie,” the feature film, is not a message film. It’s kind of sad. It’s about a single person. You see him both as an adult and you see him in and out of prison and jail, but you see him also as a child, and I think there is something sad about not being a child anymore.
If I’d do footage of you now, and if you were fortunate enough to have a father and mother who shot 80-millimeter film of you when you were 7 or 8, you could probably do something very poignant, because the fact that we’re constantly morphing as human beings – there is something sad about it. Because in the end, we die, which is really awful. I think “Willie” does a lot of that, it goes back and forth in time, and he’s a very powerful character.
I don’t know what the message of that is. Longevity is a good thing. He’s dead. I made a sequel, but Willie died.
I met him when he was about 12 and filmed him, and I used that footage, and I filmed him again at length when he was a teenager. He was kind of remarkable. And then I saw him again on a street corner, about two miles from here, where I’m sitting, and he had just come out of prison, and he was a full-fledged adult with tattoos, and he looked different.
Nancy and I bought his gravestone, and he’s in the local cemetery. Almost everybody in that film is here in the local cemetery. It’s all kind of sad. That’s the other side of life. He only lived to be about 40 or something like that.
E.G.: I want to ask you about something you wrote on your Bleak Beauty blog . You wrote a message to the Parkland Students, under the banner that “Chuck McDew is dead.” You said it was a myth that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the Civil Rights Movement, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to elaborate on that statement and what it means for today’s youth.
D.L.: I was very excited, as I think millions were, to see these kids on television fighting back. And I was terribly moved by that. I did a blog then, and it reminded me so much of the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, which I was part of and witnessed – I was 20 years old and ended up in jail with Dr. King. We didn’t hang out together. I ended up as a bigger SNCC person (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), and seeing this first-hand, this amazing uprising and very successful period in American history where what was a grassroots uprising of mostly young people, including high-school people, really did not only change America, but changed the world, by the way.
There were different organizations in the Civil Rights Movement. There were four of them, and SNCC was the “point of the spear,” that’s a term from Africa. They were the ones on the front lines. They were the kids. They were the younger people. Dr. King was older, he was a minister, and there was criticism of his leadership.
In Albany, where I was in jail with him, he would show up and huge numbers of people would appear, you know, the way Bernie Sanders would show up in Portland and he’d get 10,000 screaming people, but then Dr. King would leave and all those people would go home. And SNCC, the young people, had a very different attitude, they went to Portland, they stayed, they organized, they got involved with gangs, they got involved with schools, and they literally changed the lives of people who then became full-time activists.
I think what happened going forward is once he was martyred – basically they forgot about the Civil Rights Movement after it happened. Then years later, started making films about it, and all they did was show the same speech over and over and over. Everybody knows about “I have a Dream.”
I was there when he made that speech. I was probably within 200 or 300 feet of him because I was SNCC, and I was on the podium, and I didn’t even listen to him. I had zero interest in it. This might horrify everyone, like turning your back on Lincoln during the Gettysburg Address, which some people did I guess. But I listened to John Lewis because he spoke for the young people, and that’s how people felt.
I think what happened in the media, they see King, they see a great leader, and it’s a terrible mistake, because this has been drummed into our brains ad nauseam by NPR and everybody who’s documented the movement on major corporate television, that a leader will arise.
Basically, the message to the Parkland kids is: Don’t wait for a leader because it’s never going to happen. You have to do it yourselves. Which I think they started to do.
Chuck McDew, by the way, was one of the first chairman of SNCC, and a friend of mine, and he died recently. So many of the great leaders at SNCC have died recently. Julian Bond died, tragically, a year ago. I still can’t believe he’s gone. Tom Hayden, who was a leader of the radical left died recently, Muhammad Ali died. They’re my generation – I’m the same age as all of those people.
E.G.: I asked our staff photographers what they would ask you, given then chance. I have a couple questions from them.
From photographer Benjamin Brink: How you do you see your style of “new journalism” in comparison to the instant gratification of many of today’s photographers? They shoot, and then move on, with many photos being worth more than a single great photo in today’s click-driven photojournalism.
D.L.: There have always been photographers who have taken lots of pictures; people who have motorized cameras.
These phones are kind of astounding. You can take really good movies, and you do what they call bursts, where you can take 10 pictures. But no, you shouldn’t take a lot of pictures. You see them in your mind’s eye, and you make that picture.
My pictures are almost perfect, but I work hard to do it, and I don’t take a lot of them. I actually number the rolls of film I’ve taken my entire life, and in 50 years I think I’ve taken 2,000 rolls of film. I think “The Bikeriders” was done with about 150 rolls of film. But I’d have one great picture on every contact sheet, or maybe two. That was enough.
With a 35-millimeter, there are 36 exposures. So you can take 36 pictures before you have to change the film.
I take very few pictures. I mean, I would go work all day long; I would photograph the prison system almost every single day for 14 months. I would go out there. I would shoot two rolls in a day. And I would take all day to do that. And maybe in those two rolls, I would have one masterpiece, and that was what I was trying to do.
You can’t take great pictures by taking lots of pictures. That’s not what photography is about.
I have four children, and three of them are artists, and I remember one of the boys saying, “I’m a filmmaker.” And he took out his phone or his camera or whatever, and I said, “Well, you didn’t edit it.”
You can’t just take pictures and put them out there – you can, but they’re of no interest to anybody. It’s kind of like vomiting or diarrhea or something. It’s terrible, because it’s visual pollution.
Instagram is interesting. I have an account, it’s new for me and someone was doing it for me. Mine, because I don’t take pictures much anymore, are mostly old, mostly stuff from 50 or 30 years ago. But then anybody who follows me, you can look at their pictures, and it’s almost like looking at someone else’s diary – like peeping or looking in someone’s life who you don’t know.
I do it now and then. It is a kind of voyeurism. I enjoy it, but it’s a visual communication.
I like these emojis, I know they’re silly, but they’re like hieroglyphics. They’re visual communication, Instead of saying the F-word you can find a yellow, white or black finger or whatever. I think among my most favorite are women in sports and yoga positions, because I think inside me is a pretty girl standing on her head.
Photographer Arkady Brown: What photography has taught you about the human experience?
D.L.: I’ve had a great human experience. I don’t think I could have done better with my life. I regret nothing. I’ve had a wonderful time being alive, and the reason I mention that is I’m old and I’m not going to be here forever. I’m not even going to be here for a long time.
E.G.: Have you been documenting recent protests?
D.L.: The last thing I did was the night the devil was elected. I joined the spontaneous marches in Manhattan and filmed that. I did the original Occupy (Wall Street), which I loved, and I did it passionately. I had enough money to just get on a plane, and I was at the park where it happened. It began in New York, but it went on for months. I was able to fly to L.A. and photograph that. They had just busted it up, it was the steps of City Hall, and they were all getting out of jail, and I loved that, and I was able to do Occupy Oakland when it was still going on. I loved that. But there are so many people there, so many cell phones. They don’t need me.
E.G.: With so many people on the scene with cell phones, how does that change the photography of civil rights movements today as opposed to the 1960s?
D.L.: I didn’t go to Ferguson, but when it happened, I was interviewed by The Times because the images that came out of Ferguson were so similar to my images, which became quite famous over time.
One of the great things for me, was I had the Civil Rights Movement to myself for about a year, which is just awesome, before the photographers came down. When they came down, I left.
But it’s about history. When I talk about the Civil Rights Movement, it happened over 50 years ago. That’s two full generations, and in times of revolution, time is compressed. That means so much happened in say five years, what normally takes a century, that’s the nature of revolution.
What I find amazing is that people are so interested in what happened 50 years ago. I think when I was a young person in the Civil Rights Movement, white people – the culture I came from – had no interest in what had happened, and the media had zero interest in what happened, 50 years earlier. Nobody was interested.
I think in a way, America has become so backward and so conservative for so long, things have become so terrible, that I think in a way it’s like water in a dishwasher that’s turning over, or in a washing machine, and this inspiring period is coming back big time, and people care about it because they’re activists now, and they realize how drastic things are and how drastic the measures are needed by people to overcome them.
Most of Lyon’s films are viewable at Vimeo.com . His blog and other publications, including signed copies of his books, can be found at his website, bleakbeauty.com .
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org . Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites .
Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots
