Danny Lyon Quotes

• The pictures do not ask you to help these people, but something much more difficult; to be briefly, intensely aware of their existence, an existence as real and significant as your own.

  Danny Lyon

  Real, People, Helping

  Danny Lyon (2009). “Memories of myself: essays”, Phaidon Press

  13 Copy quote

• I wanted to change history and preserve humanity. But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.

  Danny Lyon

  Humanity, Process, Changed

  Danny Lyon (2009). “Memories of myself: essays”, Phaidon Press

  10 Copy quote

• The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble.

  Danny Lyon

  Mind, Cameras, Tools

  12 Copy quote

• As a child I had been so afraid of so many things, but as soon as I held a camera in my hand, I began to expose myself to the very things that were foreign to me and that I had always feared.

  Danny Lyon

  Children, Hands, Cameras

  6 Copy quote

• I feel totally responsible for what I see. I feel totally responsible for what I photograph.

  Danny Lyon

  Photograph, Responsible, Feels

  9 Copy quote

• It’s a very weird thing being a photographer.

  Danny Lyon

  Photographer, Weird Things

  7 Copy quote

• The sign at the entrance to my gym locker room says, no cell phones please, cell phones are cameras. They are not. A camera is a Nikon or a Leica or Rolleiflex, and when you strike someone with one, they know they have been hit with something substantial.

  Danny Lyon

  Phones, Cells, Cameras

  6 Copy quote

• If 'The Wild One' were filmed today, Marlon Brando and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club would all have to wear helmets. I used to be afraid that when (Hells) Angels became movie stars and Cal the hero of the book, the bikerider would perish on the coffee tables of America. But now I think that this attention doesn't have the strength of reality of the people it aspires to know, and that as long as Harley-Davidsons are manufactured other bikeriders will appear, riding unknown and beautiful through Chicago, into the streets of Cicero.

  Danny Lyon

  Beautiful, Stars, Coffee

  6 Copy quote

• [The people who run things] are so successful in the way they do it now. They could buy me off with a couple of vintage prints, they could have you do an ad, or give you a ribbon... In capitalist countries they reward artists because we're ineffectual.

  Danny Lyon

  Running, Country, Couple

  4 Copy quote

• I was a bike rider, a photographer and a history student, probably in that order. (On his early years)

  Danny Lyon

  Order, Years, Students

  6 Copy quote

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