PURCHASE, NY.- A portfolio of photographs by Danny Lyon, (American, b. 1942- ) were donated recently to the Neuberger Museum of Art by Monah and Alan Gettner. Selections from the portfolio will be on view in the Neuberger galleries from March 6 through May 8, 2005 when the Museum opens “Exposed! Thirty Years of Collecting Photography,” an exhibition that celebrates the Neuberger Museum of Art’s 30th Anniversary.

Danny Lyon is one of the most original documentary photographers of the late 20th century. Considered a pioneer of socially conscious documentary photography, Lyon observes people living on the margins of mainstream society. Danny Lyon photographs have been part of American iconography since he first burst onto the scene as the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) photographer, where at the age of twenty he made some of the classic images of the civil rights movement.

A self-taught photographer who is also important as an American filmmaker and writer, Lyon grew up in a middle-class section of New York City. He studied history at the University of Chicago, and in 1962 joined the civil rights movement.

Lyon is best known as one of the pioneers of photographic “New Journalism.” Like his contemporaries Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, who wrote subjective impressions while fully enmeshed in a situation, Lyon documented social change from within a community. While involved with SNCC, Lyon recorded the violence and idealism of the times and saw his work published in The Movement, a 1964 documentary book about the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

Later, Lyon published The Bikeriders, a study of the lives of outlaw motorcyclists, and Conversations with the Dead, a portrait of prison life in Texas in the late 1960s. Incorporating even more diverse subject matter, in 1989 Lyon published I Like to Eat Right on the Dirt, featuring Polaroid prints of his children. As a filmmaker, Lyon made documentaries that include The Abandoned Children, Little Boy, and El Otro Lado (The Other Side).

Lyon has produced ten books of photographs, won two Guggenheim Awards, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and ten fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in photography and non-fiction film. His images and books have influenced photography, journalism, and motion pictures, have been presented on the floor of Congress, and used as evidence in prison reform trials. It has been suggested that his photographs and life with motorcyclists in the mid-sixties were an inspiration for the film Easy Rider.

Lyon's work is included in the permanent collections of MOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C., and many of the major California museums. He continues to photograph and to make films.