ART : Adventures of the Shootist : Danny Lyon is a rebellious maverick who immerses himself in volatile American subcultures that others avoid. He’s found his latest photo opportunities by walking the streets of Los Angeles.

“I love the idea of the lone gunman, the guy who slips a camera into his pocket and walks down a big city street,” says photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon as he strolls purposefully along Broadway in downtown L.A. in search of photo opportunities. “It’s a great figure to be because you’re playing a double role--you’re part of the scene around you, but you’re doing something that separates you from the rest of the people there.”

In Los Angeles working on a series documenting the local immigrant community, Lyon is surveying the crowded street with the intensity of an X-ray machine as he earnestly expounds his philosophy of life.

“From earliest childhood I sensed there was a conspiracy in this society to destroy my individuality and that I’d have to fight to be me, and I’ve continued to feel that way throughout my life.

“The very structure of this society prevents us from being free because there’s too much control,” he proclaims. “There’s corporate control, the subliminal control of mass media, grant control messing with the arts--there’s control all over the place and it doesn’t help the truth come out. So my advice is buck the system--you’ll have more fun and do better work.”

“Buck the system” has been the law Lyon’s lived by, and it’s no doubt contributed to the fact that his work isn’t better known. A reclusive maverick who’s developed an uncensored photographic style rooted in his ability to immerse himself in volatile subcultures most of us make a point of avoiding, Lyon is the subject of an exhibition at the Jan Kesner Gallery that should rekindle his relationship with the audience that admired the masterful work he did in the ‘60s. Featured in the show are three previously unexhibited series done in Chicago in 1965, and Knoxville, Tenn., and Galveston, Tex., in 1967, as well as prints from the series on Los Angeles currently in progress.

All this work is in the tradition of poetic street photography pioneered by Swiss artist Robert Frank, who was a friend of Lyon’s and a major influence on his work during the ‘60s. It was during that heady decade that a school of young photographers including Lyon, Larry Clark, Danny Seymour and Ralph Gibson were taking photography into previously uncharted waters, doing raw photo essays on biker gangs, drug addicts, petty criminals, transvestites and prisoners on Death Row. Under the sway of the Beat Generation artists, Lyon and his cronies exposed the dark underbelly of the false, idyllic dream of American life created by the media in the ‘50s.

Described by Lyon as “advocacy journalism,” his work harks back to an era when our concern as a society for human suffering was at its zenith; it’s a sad reflection on the ‘90s that the work feels oddly dated today. Part of a photographic lineage that stretches back through Diane Arbus, W. Eugene Smith, Walker Evans, Dorthea Lange, Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, Lyon’s work fell out of favor during the theory-driven ‘70s and ‘80s. However, the acclaim recently accorded work by Mary Ellen Mark and Sebastiao Salgado suggests that socially conscious photography may be making a comeback. Hence, it’s a good time to take another look at Lyon who’s the subject of a retrospective exhibit currently touring Europe. (Originating in Germany, the show will come to four U.S. cities in 1993-94.)

“There’s something almost anti-creative about street photography,” says Lyon, his eyes darting from one spot of action on Broadway to the next as he weaves inconspicuously through the crowd, “because the less ‘creative’ you are the better it comes out. Look at work by Lewis Hine or Walker Evans--you have no sense of the person who made those images, they’re simply not in there. What you have instead is a palpable sense of what it is to stand in the street depicted in the image. The art of street photography is to keep your personality out of the image, and that’s in direct conflict with the ego of the artist who sees himself as transforming the world into something beautiful. I try not to mess with stuff too much because I see great beauty in the world as I find it.”

It takes a fairly sophisticated viewer to discern the beauty in Lyon’s work, which usually concerns itself with the persecution of social outcasts and underdogs. His work was first seen in 1964 in “The Movement; Documentary of a Struggle for Equality,” a book documenting the civil rights movement. At the age of 20, Lyon became a staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and he spent the years 1962-64 photographing racial unrest in the Deep South. (A new volume of this work featuring several previously unseen images, “Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement,” will be published this fall by the University of North Carolina Press).

Subsequent books by Lyon included: “The Bikeriders,” a chronicle of a Midwestern motorcycle gang published in 1968; “The Destruction of Lower Manhattan,” a visual record of vanishing historical buildings in New York published in 1969; “Conversations With the Dead,” which offered a harrowing tour of the Texas prison system; “The Paper Negative,” a tribute to the children who live on the streets of Colombia, and the Mexican immigrants who come to the United States in search of work; “Merci Gonaives: A Photographer’s Account of Haiti and the February Revolution,” published in 1988; and “I Like to Eat Right on the Dirt,” an homage to Lyon’s family published in 1989.

Lyon also edited “The Autobiography of Billy McCune,” the memoirs of a man who castrated himself in prison after being sentenced to death for a rape he committed at the age of 19. (Unfortunately, this brilliantly written book is out of print, as are all of Lyon’s early books. His more recent books are available from Bleak Beauty Press, R.D.I. Box 150, Barclay Road, Clintondale, N. Y. 12515.)

At the core of all of Lyon’s work beats the heart of a committed liberal and Lyon makes no bones about the fact that “growing up after World War II, I felt art had to be political--that was very important to me.” On hearing Lyon’s family history it’s easy to understand why.

“It’s amazing how close history is,” says Lyon as he launches into his life story. An open and intensely emotional man who clearly relishes wrestling with complex philosophical issues, Lyon grew up listening to family stories that introduced him at a young age to the theme of mercy--a theme that’s central to his work.

“I’m a first-generation American born in Brooklyn from immigrant parents,” he says. “My mother was a Russian who was born under the Czar and lived through the Russian Revolution. She was the youngest in a family of 10 children and her mother was 50 when she had her, so her mother was born in the middle of the 19th Century. My mother emigrated to America with her family in the ‘20s during a period of mass starvation in Russia. The Russian side of my family was extremely socially conscious--my uncle on my mother’s side participated in the 1905 Revolution and saw Trotsky speak many times. He had to leave Russia because he was charged with murdering a policeman so he came to America and became a doctor and delivered me from his sister’s body.

“My father was a German Jew who was a medical student during the years Hitler was coming into power and he saw Hitler repeatedly--Hitler frequented a bar in Munich where the students from my father’s school went. In 1933, just when my father became a doctor, Hitler became chancellor of Germany and passed a law that Jews couldn’t be doctors. So my father left and came to America where he became a doctor--in fact, Alfred Stieglitz was one of his patients.

“I grew up in Queens, which was very homogeneous and boring and I hated it--I knew in my guts I was missing some kind of romance in life,” he continues. “I was 14 when Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ was published and that book confirmed my suspicion that there was another America out there and I wanted to see it. So when I was 20 I set out on a hitchhiking tour of the South, and I began my trip on Route 66 because that was the road the hero of Kerouac’s book took. I went looking for Kerouac’s America and what I found was something else--I found worlds within worlds. It was incredible what happened to me.”

The first thing that happened to Lyon was the civil rights movement.

“I began taking photographs when I was a student at the University of Chicago, but I didn’t become seriously involved with it until I joined the civil rights movement in the summer of my junior year. I was deeply committed to that as a student and I began taking what turned out to be historic photographs.”

Though Lyon was committed to the movement, his passion for it was tempered by a reporter’s detachment that’s critical to his work; the power of Lyon’s art rests on his ability to achieve an authentic intimacy with his subjects, while remaining uninvolved enough to be able to walk away when a body of work is completed.

“I had to maintain a certain distance,” says Lyon, “because it was important that I not lose sight of what I was doing--I was a photographer and a journalist trying to do a book. I wasn’t the guy getting his head beat in at a sit-in--I was the guy documenting the guy getting his head beat in, and there’s a big difference.”

After completing his involvement with SNCC in 1964, Lyon was looking for a new project and told a mechanic he knew that he wanted to photograph a motorcycle gang. “This guy said, ‘I’m in the Chicago Outlaws--why don’t you come to a meeting?’ ” Lyon recalls. “So I went to the meeting and someone said, ‘Why don’t you become a member?’ So I joined and spent the next two years drinking two quarts of beer every Friday night and taking photographs.”

Lyon’s two-year stint with the Outlaws resulted in “The Bikeriders,” a critically acclaimed book that marked him as a young talent to watch. In 1966 Lyon returned to New York where he spent the next few months photographing the demolition of buildings in Lower Manhattan. Then he hit the road again.

“In 1967 I went to Knoxville, Tennessee, because James Agee was born there and I was looking for his house,” says Lyon, referring to the writer who collaborated with Walker Evans on “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a landmark work of photojournalism. “Agee’s house had been torn down and replaced by the James Agee condominiums, but I spent a week in Knoxville anyhow making photos of the people who lived there. Then I went to Galveston because I was interested in photographing the shrimp boats there, and in Galveston I met a group of black transvestites and started spending every day with them taking pictures. (Then) I saw signs for the Texas prison rodeo. That led me to discovering the Texas prison system, and I spent the next two years shooting in the prisons.

“I became very close to the inmates,” says Lyon of his experience there, “and I traded off stories about girls and Hollywood in exchange for stories about their lives. This might sound disturbing but I think some of the guys liked it in there because it is a unique setup. Some of the people in there are extraordinarily powerful individuals and when you confine them in a small concrete cell they practically start glowing. Imagine throwing an artist you really like into a cell--it’s a horrible idea but the result is this intensity that’s just not going to exist when you see them next to the barbecue in the back yard. That’s what you have in prison, only you might have 20 or 30 guys like that.”

One of the remarkable things about this body of work was the freedom Texas officials granted to Lyon within the prison system. That freedom only lasted for a while, however.

“Early in my career I was quite aggressive and I wound up getting thrown out of every project I did,” says Lyon with a laugh. “I’d push it until it turned bad and that’s what happened with the prison work. When I began the series I was allowed to go anywhere, but slowly they began restricting my freedom--of course, they were naive to let me in in the first place. They let me in because they thought I was going to do an annual report about what a great prison it was, and the officials said I betrayed them when they saw the book I did. I tried to show it to be a horrible place because it was horrible--no picture could convey what it’s like to stand in those corridors.”

On completing the prison work in 1969 Lyon returned to Manhattan, where he fell in with Robert Frank.

“I’d become friends with Mark di Suvero when I was a student in Chicago and when I got to New York I looked up Mark and he introduced me to Robert,” says Lyon. “I ended up living in Robert’s apartment and we formed a company called Sweeney Films. I did sound on Robert’s films and edited my first film, which was on a tattoo artist, in his house.

“Robert played a huge role in liberating American photography. The horizons are cockeyed in his images, a guy’s head is behind a tree, part of the picture is blurred--he blew photography wide open and he’s been a tremendous influence on countless artists, including me. Eventually I had to get away from Robert because he was too strong a force to be around, so in 1970 I moved to a small Chicano town in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico and began making films. I stayed there for about 10 years.

“The moment I became a filmmaker I vanished because independent filmmaking has been a total disaster in America--you spend years struggling to make a film and nobody sees it,” says Lyon, who has completed 10 films and has been working on a documentary about America for the last few years. His films--lyrical documentaries about his friends and family, Mexican illegals in the Southwest, the prostitutes and abandoned children of Colombia--are very much like his photographs in subject matter and mood.

The problems Lyon faced getting his films seen plagued his photographic work, too, for a spell.

“During the ‘80s I couldn’t get anything published and couldn’t get a gallery in New York,” says Lyon, whose last exhibit in Manhattan was at the Witkin Gallery in 1987. “My work was out of vogue because photography was very much in the realm of theory then--fortunately, it’s moving away from that. The thing gaining power now is what I call ‘corporate photography’--corporate money is surfacing as an increasingly powerful force in photography. Any corporation can decide to underwrite a photo exhibition and museums will stage a big, splashy show, and it’s corporations--not curators and scholars--who are writing art history. And it shouldn’t be that way.”

The problems Lyon sees in the art world are nothing compared to the problems he sees eating away at America. “We’re going through a rotten time now,” he laments. “We’ve swung way to the right, we’ve stayed there for 25 years and we’ve collapsed as a society. I spend a lot of time denouncing America, and yet I like America. I like it because it’s the first country in history to treat Jews as human beings, and because there are lots of Mexicans and African-Americans here. I like America for all the people who come here from other places to be Americans.”

The rich racial mix of Los Angeles is precisely what appealed to Lyon this spring during a visit from his home in Upstate New York, where he’s lived since 1987 with his wife of 15 years and four children.

“I fell in love with Los Angeles when someone took me downtown and I saw this scene on Broadway--it’s fantastic! I first saw L.A. in 1964 and it’s become a much more interesting place since then--American cities in general are more interesting now because their populations have become much more diverse.

“The first day I was shooting down here I was riveted to the corner of Third and Broadway where the Million Dollar Theater is. After I’d had my fill of that, I walked half a block and found a big open bar straight out of Veracruz. It was mostly men drinking beer, but there were families and children there too and there were these great bands going. First I just stood there for 20 minutes, then I timidly began to photograph. Someone would notice me and I’d change my spot and shoot some more, and slowly I got more aggressive. You start out with a kind of paranoia, thinking ‘If I go in there they’re gonna kill me,’ and you end up with your arm around someone and your camera’s being passed around and people are pouring beer on it. I love that aspect of this work.”