Nathan Lyons worked outside mainstream aesthetics, eschewing pomposity, while capturing wonderment amid everyday banality.
Over the course of six decades, Nathan Lyons’s innovations as a curator, teacher, collector, publisher and writer shaped the course of photography.
He gave Lee Friedlander his first solo show in 1963, and was an early champion of work by Danny Lyon, Bruce Davidson, Duane Michals and Garry Winogrand in “Toward a Social Landscape,” the 1966 exhibit that underscored the “snapshot aesthetic” in contemporary photography. His book “Photographers on Photography: A Critical Anthology,” was one of the first collections of photographers’ writings. Dawoud Bey once wrote that he carried “a copy of this seminal book, reading and re-reading it, until it was dog-eared and the spine had to be taped together.”
When Lyons died in 2016, his influence was so wide-ranging that it elicited a flood of grateful personal testimonies. “His love for us and the work we do was fierce and tender and wise,” wrote the curator and historian Alison Nordstrom. “His passion for his own work was irresistible. He did the right thing again and again. He fought: pomposity, jargon, smugness and abuse of power. I loved him with all my heart.” Looking at his wider impact and legacy, Generative Systems artist Sonia Sheridan said, “Nathan Lyons did not just influence individual people, he affected whole systems of action and thought.”