Next to Robert Frank’s The Americans, there may be no book of midcentury American photography more influential than The Bikeriders, Danny Lyon’s landmark work from 1968. It’s not just the unforgettable photographs, which focus on the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club; it’s also the text that accompanies them—intimate, revealing interviews with the riders and their women that Lyon, a twentysomething armed with nothing but a Rolleiflex, a Nikon, and a seven-pound reel-to-reel tape recorder, captured during the three years he spent among the Outlaws.
The book reveals the inner life of a subculture of outsiders that few people had seen up close before that time, and it proved instrumental in inspiring a new generation of photojournalism, one that blended immersive, New Journalism–like reporting with bold, documentary-style shooting. The result was gritty yet humane black-and-white shots that, like Walker Evans’s Depression-era photos in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, rose to the level of art. Almost 60 years later, Lyon’s taut, 128-page book still vibrates with the propulsive power of a film.
