The Seventh Dog

The Seventh Dog is Danny Lyon's own account of a fifty-year career, told backward from the present to his 1960s beginnings — as much a self-portrait in fragments as a survey of one of American documentary photography's defining bodies of work.

Working in reverse chronology, Lyon interleaves black-and-white and color photographs with letters, contact sheets, collages, and other personal ephemera, much of it printed here for the first time, alongside his own written commentary. The 240-page hardcover moves from recent work back through his years in New Mexico and Haiti, his filmmaking, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, Conversations with the Dead, and The Bikeriders, arriving finally at his photographs of the early-1960s civil rights movement, made as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's first staff photographer. Phaidon designed the cover as a collaged tribute to Kelton Labs, Lyon's printer of several decades.

Lyon (b. 1942) helped establish the immersive, participatory strain of American documentary photography, living for extended periods among the people he photographed rather than observing from outside. The Seventh Dog joins the library's holdings of Conversations with the Dead and The Bikeriders, supplying the connective narrative between Lyon's individual bodies of work in his own voice.