Two Early SNCC Press Photos (1962-64) by Danny Lyon - 1964

Atlanta, GA: SNCC, 1964. 8 x 10 inch silver gelatin prints with crop marks in red. With SNCC's rubber stamp and contemporary inked and penciled notes to verso sides, as well as a photoengraving order form stuck to one regarding and order for its reproduction method in print. Slight edge wear, mostly to corners; remnants of scotch tape to edges, some light soiling; images remain vibrant and crisp.. Two silver gelatin prints of Danny Lyon photographs, issued by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as press photos, which together bookmark Lyon's short-lived but highly impactful time working with the organization as their staff photographer.

Danny Lyon (b. 1942) first encountered lifelong friend John Lewis and the SNCC after hitchhiking south from Chicago to Cairo, IL and then Atlanta, GA in 1962 to help document the movement. Realizing the work of this earnest young photographer could be used to help give SNCC a "face" like its more notorious counterpart SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), organizer Paul Brooks requested a $300 grant from Harry Belafonte to fly Lyon out to the Mississippi Delta in Summer 1962 to "make pictures" of SNCC leader Bob Moses and the organization's voter registration efforts among the disenfranchised black population there. This would be Lyon's first paid photography job for the group, and predates his hiring-on as staff photographer by a full year (a position he took in June, 1963 upon finally completing his college courses).

In his book Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Lyon recalls getting secreted across highly segregated borders and towns, staying at Amzie Moore's house in Ruleville, and how "at night we drove to a church way back in the woods for a voter registration meeting". The first photograph is from that meeting, and depicts Moses conferring with an unnamed woman in a pew while Charlie Cobb, Charles McLaurin, and two older men confer in the pew ahead (in the aisle, Jesse Harris stoops over to speak with someone out of frame in the background, just his legs and arms visible). The following day, he took photos of the Rulesville canvassing, with Charlie saying he could "probably" get away with it "the first time" - a prophecy that proved out, as Lyon was detained and run out of town in Cleveland, MS the next time he pulled out his camera.


The second photo, taken in the summer of 1964, depicts two men at a "Freedom School" (improvised and most often open-air schools which taught literacy, history, and conducted voter registration) in the same part of the Mississippi Delta. In the interceding two years, Lyon had traveled all over the East and Southeast documenting the early days of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, first as a committed helper and for the second year as SNCC's first staff photographer, putting him and his iconic Nikon at almost every important event of the time. But for a variety of reasons - views on the current tactics' lesser compatibility with the photographic medium, a feeling of not being as indispensable, and a general air of fatigue - this trip to document Freedom Summer, culminating as it did in the murder of activists Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, would prove to be Lyon's last job on the SNCC staff.


Though Lyon would later go on to achieve wider individual artistic notoriety for his iconic monograph The Bikeriders and a long body of work regarding incarceration and subculture, these two photos stand as signposts from the beginning and end of Lyon's first real education in socially-conscious photography, a period that remains, in his estimation, the most worthwhile work of his life. While a few of his photos from this time were made into SNCC posters or have been editioned as prints, actual artifactual prints (in this case, press photos circa 1964/early 1965, as the stamp bears the 6 Raymond Street address for the SNCC offices) are incredibly uncommon on the market, and we can find no sales records of other examples of these photos or similar SNCC press prints as of March 2024.