Conversations With the Dead

Conversations with the Dead is Danny Lyon’s 1971 photobook, made inside six Texas prisons and centered on the men he came to know there.

The full title continues Photographs of Prison Life with the Letters and Drawings of Billy McCune. Lyon met McCune in 1968, while making the book inside the Texas Department of Corrections. McCune had been sentenced to death in 1950, and the sentence was later changed to life. The prison classified him as psychotic in 1960, and he was in the isolation ward of the Wynne Unit when they met. His watercolors were shown with Lyon’s photographs at Rice University in 1970, in a show curated by Dominique de Menil. Lyon also edited The Autobiography of Billy McCune, published in 1971. Phaidon has reissued the book as a facsimile with an afterword by Lyon on what happened to the inmates, and calls the original one of the first photobooks to include ephemera.

Lyon was born in Brooklyn in 1942 and in 1963 became the first photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His books include The Bikeriders and Knave of Hearts, and he made a series of nonfiction films in the 1970s and 1980s. Phaidon lists solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Corcoran Gallery, two Guggenheim Fellowships and ten National Endowment for the Arts awards.