Danny Lyon doesn’t want to talk about the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. The legendary documentary photographer won’t say much about riding alongside Cal, Funny Sonny, Johnny, and the rest of the leather-clad gang in the 1960s, on an old Triumph cobbled together in a Hyde Park garage out of parts kept in coffee cans. He won’t go into great detail about the photos he took with his trusty Nikon: Benny, leaning back in the saddle, a silhouette lit up from streetlights and neon signs at Grand and Division; Big Barbara, with eyes you could get lost in, staring into a jukebox; or Andy, drinking Hamm’s longnecks off a pool table at the Stoplight bar in Cicero.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, Lyon took an early interest in his father’s scrapbooks and the work of Walker Evans. At age 11, he took his first photographs—of his pet turtle. He began studying history in 1959 at the University of Chicago, but spent much of his time in the darkroom at Ida Noyes Hall. In his first year at the U. of C., he met fellow freshman Frank Jenner, who rode a 350cc BSA and who introduced Lyon to the world of motorcycles. Jenner’s smiling portrait would be the first image in The Bikeriders. It was the beginning of a tumultuous decade Lyon would intimately capture on film, a period that would see him rise from being an undergrad in Hyde Park to a Guggenheim fellow by 1969.
In the course of his work, Lyon always sought counsel from Hugh Edwards, an influential curator at the Art Institute to whom Lyon dedicated The Bikeriders. A “friend and an intellectual father” to the photographer, according to a 1996 article in DoubleTake, Edwards met Lyon in 1959 during a U. of C. Festival of the Arts event. Lyon would roll up to the loading dock of the Art Institute, “four hundred pounds of machine under me, noisy and happy,” to show him work in progress and get feedback about the project. The curator helped the photographer decide to extract himself from the gang and finish the years-long endeavor.
