These Photos Will Pull You In, and Repulse You

All the photos in Conversations With the Dead, Danny Lyon's black-and-white series documenting prison life in the late 1960s, are small enough that you have to get close to make sense of the images. Often, you'll wish you hadn't.

In one photo, a guard stands expressionless in a doorway, looking into the room where the electric chair looms terrifyingly in the foreground. Lyon gives us more than one image, like Shakedown Before Returning to the Building, of naked inmates, arms outstretched, being stripped and searched in the yard by guards in ten-gallon hats.

Lyon was granted unlimited access to the Texas penitentiary system for 14 months in '67 and '68, making Conversations a seminal work of New Journalism, a movement that encouraged artists to immerse themselves in the environments they were attempting to represent. About the experience, Lyon wrote: "I tried with whatever power I had to make a picture of imprisonment as distressing as I knew it to be…and the few times I doubted the wisdom of my attitude, I had only to visit someone I knew in his cell."

Lyon's images are starkly high-contrast, an aesthetic choice that highlights the black-and-white reality of the world they depict. Good guys and bad guys; inside and outside; lifers and parolees; inmates and guards.

The time period exerts a curious effect on the series. It makes some of the images more disturbing, like the photo of black inmates segregated from their white counterparts and hunched over in a field, picking cotton. The intervening half-century makes other images downright charming, like Seven Years Flat on a Twenty-Year Sentence, in which a dimple-chinned, pompadoured prisoner holds a kitten in the open doorway to his cell.

The most poetic image of the series is a young, shirtless inmate sitting alone next to the master controls that open all the prison cells—so close to the freedom that eludes him.

What makes looking at Conversations so uncomfortable is how jaw-droppingly beautiful the photographs are. As a viewer, it's difficult to reconcile the aesthetic pleasure you get from the images of maltreatment, humiliation, exhaustion and incarceration. It feels perverse.

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