出版社周刊评论
Lyon, a young Jewish New Yorker, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1962 as a photographer. The 212 black-and-white photographs shown here, taken from 1962 to 1965, document that short-lived, influential civil rights organization before it was undone by assassinations, the rise of the antiwar movement and the SNCC's espousal of black militancy. Lyon's images of cafeteria sit-ins and street demonstrations, showing sanguine, missionary-like protestors and furious, tight-lipped cops, are stark portraits of tension. The power of Lyon's photos is undiminished by his occasionally awkward text. Lyon debunks the myth that the 1963 march on Washington and Martin Luther King's 1965 march to Montgomery were the pivotal events of the movement; rather, they were mostly for the benefit of the media. Far more important, he writes, were the small-town skirmishes arising from the local Southern movement. Lyon ( The Bike riders ) also carefully describes the racial tensions within SNCC that were partially responsible for his leaving. The book is an honest, rich statement, transmitting the tumult, cross-purposes and devotion of the era. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Danny Lyon translated his belief in integration into action when he traveled from the University of Chicago to the Deep South to document the civil rights movement as part of his work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s. This powerful volume captures the commitment and courage of that seminal era in 212 photographs, many published for the first time, and in Lyon's detailed account of the people involved and the places they changed. Each black-and-white photograph holds us in the gaze of the people it portrays, be they young, frightened, but determined demonstrators, or their steady, restrained, but equally unwavering elders, or the mocking, grimly glaring police or angry white bystanders. Lyon photographed the famous and the unsung, the brave and the mean, the thinkers behind the sit-ins and marches, and the bold participants--as proud under arrest as walking free. The struggle for civil rights has crystallized in our minds around certain oft-repeated images. Here are some fresh takes on this all-too-recent and too easily neglected slice of our history, a point in the evolution of our country that should be valued and kept vital. (Reviewed Jan. 15, 1993)0807820547Donna Seaman
Choice 评论
As scarce as hens' teeth are lucid, candid, unpretentious memoirs written long after the fact. Nearly as uncommon is photojournalism in which the text serves as much more than adornment for photography. Thus Lyon's account of his 1962-64 stint as an activist and photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is remarkable on two counts. His photographs portray SNCC personalities and projects during the heyday of the movement, collectively capturing a sense of immense courage and human dignity in the face of violence. His narrative expresses the experiences and reflections of a northern white collegian at the center of SNCC's odyssey from a tightly knit interracial "band of brothers" to a fractious revolutionary organization choking on its own success, in which, as Julian Bond notes in his terse foreword, "race became reason against instead of reason for" and white idealists were no longer welcomed. This informed tribute merits a place in every American library, public or academic. All levels. R. A. Fischer; University of MinnesotaDSDuluth