Born in Brooklyn, Lyon was raised in Queens and studied history at the University of Chicago. He published his first photographs working as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in a documentary book about the Civil Rights Movement in the American South. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he published books of his photographs of outlaw motorcyclists, prisoners, and the demolition of Lower Manhattan. Lyon joined the Outlaws motorcycle club and befriended the death row prisoners he photographed, and his type of documentary photography--where the photographer is deeply involved with his subject--became known as New Journalism. Lyon received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 and has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. He is also a writer and filmmaker.
