"In a penal system that legalises slavery, who is the real criminal? That question lies at the heart of Danny Lyon's landmark 1971 monograph, Conversations with the Dead, a masterwork of New Journalism chronicling crime and punishment in the United States. After his work in the Civil Rights Movement and with the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club , Lyon gained unprecedented access to seven penitentiaries inside the Texas Department of Corrections over 14 months in 1967-68 to create a Dostoevskyian journey into the belly of the beast."
"Lyon remembers, "I had a press card, so they let me walk right into the rodeo and onto the dirt where the rodeo clowns, bucking horses and prisoners dressed in stripes were performing. As I was shooting, one of the clowns said to me, 'I can get you inside the prison to take photographs.'""
A photographic and mixed-media project documents life inside the Texas Department of Corrections during 1967–68, capturing portraits, film, drawings and ephemera from seven penitentiaries. The images interrogate the morality of a penal system that legalises forced labor and trace the long arc of racialized punishment through intimate scenes of prisoners and institutional spectacle. Access was obtained through opportunism and charm, producing candid material from events like a prison rodeo and conversations with officials. A contemporary exhibition re-presents the material, linking mid‑century penal practices to the ongoing prison-industrial complex and amplifying the work's contemporary resonance.
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