Danny Lyon: The Only Thing I Saw Worth Leaving

Danny Lyon once described the writer James Agee as. "a romantic who adored reality," an epithet equally apt to describe him. Lyon made a name for himself in the 1960s with an embedded style of reportage, capturing a compelling beauty in the people and places he befriended across the country, from student leaders of the civil rights movement to convicts in Texas prisons. Drawn primarily from the Bell Gallery Collection, The only Thing I Saw Worth Leaving presents photographs from some of Lyon's most significant series along with films and other work, organized around the principles that he refers to time and again: empathy, freedom, history, destruction, and narrative.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.