Bikeriders.

Photographs and text by Danny Lyon.

Chronicle Books, San Francisco, USA, 2003. English, 128 pp., 58 black-and-white and 13 color illustrations, 7½x10".

In 1968, just before Easy Rider roared its way into American consciousness, Danny Lyon published The Bikeriders. A seminal work of modern photojournalism, this landmark collection of photographs and interviews documents the abandon and risk implied in the name of the gang Lyon belonged to: the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. With images and interviews that are as raw, alive, and dramatic today as they were three decades ago, this new edition includes startling new images: 15 additional black-and-white photographs and 14 color prints-long thought missing-of works originally published in black-and-white. With a new introduction by the author, The Bikeriders rides again, capturing like never before the dawn of the counterculture era.

Lyon's in-depth study of a Chicago motorcycle gang, of which he was a member, has just been reissued with unpublished color work thought to have been lost. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Galerie Mennour has mounted a show of both The Bikeriders work, and his most recent project, Indian Nations. This wonderful catalogue contains an interview with Lyon and a sampling from these two bodies of work. "Influences? Once in Paris a filmmaker said I was 'the most American person he ever met.' Perhaps because I have very bad manners and a heavy New York City (Queens) accent. As the child of two immigrants born in Brooklyn and growing up in Queens I felt 'as American as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.' I grew up liking Matthew Brady The Historian with the Camera. And Life Magazine, with Gene Smith and Magnum photographers was usually lying on the coffee table in our house. But as a student in Chicago in the early sixties, I became politicised, and eventually grew to detest the Life Magazine of the 1960s. One of my ambitions when I conceived of The Bikeriders, was to destroy Life Magazine. And so I thought here is a better way. Real people that were the antithesis of middle class America. A text (made with a tape recorder) to show you they were real live human beings."-Danny Lyon.

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