A 21 anni, il padre di Danny Lyon gli lasciò una Oldsmobile del 1953. Fu allora che scoprì il piacere di sfrecciare lungo le autostrade della Georgia durante il movimento per i diritti civili, con i campi rossi di arachidi e cotone che passavano veloci accanto a lui. Nell'euforia della guida, Lyon prese coscienza della propria mortalità. 'Lyon's Junk: America in Ruins' raccoglie 86 fotografie di automobili americane, per lo più degli anni '50 e '60, scattate nei depositi di rottami degli Stati Uniti occidentali. Le immagini sono state realizzate in Nebraska, Texas, Nuovo Messico, Arizona e Oklahoma. Si tratta di un'opera di pura fotografia visiva. L'idea alla base del progetto è che molte cose-sculture, monumenti, edifici-acquisiscono una nuova e ulteriore bellezza man mano che si deteriorano e diventano rovine: un certo pathos si aggiunge alla loro bellezza originale. Questo vale anche per le automobili di questa serie: un tempo amate macchine di famiglie e persone che le possedevano e guidavano, ora evocano una bellezza terribile e una profonda malinconia.

'This is my life. I'm talking about' di Danny Lyon è un 'memoir book' che attraversa la vita dell'autore come un flusso di coscienza. Prendendo le mosse dalle origini della sua famiglia, che nel 1905 emigrò dalla Russia dello Zar Nicola II negli Stati Uniti d'America per sfuggire ad una complicata situazione, Lyon in questo libro conduce il lettore nel vivo della storia della sua vita iniziata a Brooklyn nel 1942 ed attraversata da molti degli snodi cruciali del XX secolo. Fa così la sua comparsa il racconto appassionato dell'amicizia con John Lewis, politico di spicco durante gli anni delle lotte per la conquista dei diritti civili per gli afro americani. Allo stesso modo il libro offre uno spaccato della vita di Lyon che dal 1963 al 1967 visse tra i motociclisti del Midwest, protagonisti del suo iconico libro fotografico 'The Bikeriders' (1968). Attraverso i racconti e le fotografie, alcune delle quali inedite, Lyon, da vero esponente del New Journalism fotografico, consente al lettore di scavalcare lo steccato dell'osservatore esterno dei fatti per offrirne, invece, una visione da vero protagonista.

Una copia facsimile in edizione limitata del libro fotografico/diario originale di Danny Lyn, redatto nel corso dei suoi cinque viaggi nella provincia dello Shanxi, nella Cina sudorientale. Il fotografo crea un ritratto dei luoghi e dell'umanità che incontra immergendosi con coraggiosa determinazione nella cultura locale.

“I came to see the buildings as fossils of a time past. These buildings were used during the Civil War. The men were all dead, but the buildings were still here, left behind as the city grew around them....The passing of buildings was for me a great event. It didn’t matter so much whether they were of architectural importance. What mattered to me was that they were about to be destroyed. Whole blocks would disappear. An entire neighborhood. Its few last loft occupying tenants were being evicted, and no place like it would ever be built again. The streets involved were among the oldest in New York and when sections of some were closed by the barriers of the demolition men, it meant they would never be opened again.”
—Danny Lyon

In late 1966, Danny Lyon returned to New York City, having just finished The Bikeriders. He was twenty-five. Living in a loft on the corner of Beekman and William Streets in Downtown Manhattan, Lyon saw that half the buildings on Beekman Street were boarded up, about to be demolished. That year an incredible sixty acres of mostly nineteenth-century buildings were slated for demolition, all below Canal Street. The seven-acre site where the Twin Towers would eventually stand was being cleared, a new ramp added to the Brooklyn Bridge, Pace University expanded, and the Washington Market was being moved to the Bronx. Whole sections of Lower Manhattan were being turned into rubble.

Lyon thought of the title The Destruction of Lower Manhattan first, and then made a record of each building before it was demolished. The book was released by Macmillan Publishers in 1969, and remaindered a few years later; the copies sold for one dollar each. It has been a collector’s item ever since.

Thirty-eight years after these photographs were made, many of them are the only record that survives of entire blocks that once lined Fulton Street, and West Street along the Hudson. Because of the disaster that would strike the city a generation later, New Yorkers have taken on a renewed and fervent interest in the architecture of their city. This work is a major contribution to that new world. For Lyon, these buildings in their last days standing were the embodiment of a beauty and pathos that people walking by in the street seldom noticed at the time. Those feelings were preserved in the photographs that today survive exactly as the young author intended, as a memory and a record of what was.

Knave of Hearts is a visual memoir in which Danny Lyon recounts his adventures as a photographer. It is illustrated with his color photo-montages and unpublished pictures from his three classic photodocumentary works, The Bikeriders, Conversations with the Dead, and The Destruction of Lower Manhattan. Most of the photographic plates are color reproductions of Lyon's photo-montages, hand-made, one of a kind works which were years in the making. All are published here for the first time. The autobiographical text tells his family's history beginning with the 1905 revolution in Russia, and covers the convolutions and unrest of 1960's America and the social radicalism of New Mexico in the 1970's, both of which he saw close up and first hand. Lyon's unlikely heroes include Hugh Edwards, perhaps the most influential curator of photography of his time, James Ray Renton, convicted cop killer and lifer, Muhammad Ali, who Lyon meets in Miami, and Willie Jaramillo, the star-crossed subject of a number of Lyon's films. In words and photographs Lyon memorializes the friends, family, and adventures of his life.