The Bikeriders

Danny Lyon's The Bikeriders is a founding document of American New Journalism photography: a first-person portrait of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club made by a photographer who rode with them rather than watched from outside.

Between 1963 and 1967, Lyon joined the Outlaws as a member, photographing initiations, funerals, cross-country runs, and ordinary downtime, then paired the pictures with transcribed interviews in the riders' own words. First published in 1968, the book combines 48 duotone black-and-white photographs with oral history, a hybrid of documentary photography and reportage that anticipated the immersive nonfiction of the following decade. This edition, reissued by Aperture, restores the original journal-sized format and sequence.

Lyon began his career photographing the civil rights movement for SNCC before turning his camera on the incarcerated in Conversations with the Dead and on New York's vanishing built environment in The Destruction of Lower Manhattan. The Bikeriders established the embedded, participant-observer method that runs through his later work and inspired the 2024 feature film of the same name.