DANNY LYON | Conversations with the Dead : Photographs of Prison Life with the Letters and Drawings of Billy McCune #122054 - first edition

First edition, second printing, 1971

Cited as Lyon’s “masterpiece”on page 18 of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's "The Photobook: A History Volume II"

Included in Andrew Roth’s The Book of 101 Books (pages 210-211).

75 black & white photographs, 5 color illustrations and 6 black & white identity photographs.  Contains nudity. 

Very good overall condition. Near fine book in very good jacket. First free endpaper has former owner’s signature and date. Slight crease to last free endpaper. Page edges have very minimal toning. Back dust jacket has two tears mended with archival and removable wheat paste and Japanese paper. Jacket also has light edge wear, toning, and a few shallow scratches.

Foreword by Danny Lyon; introduction, letters and drawings by Billy McCune;  Book design by Danny Lyon and Martin Stephen. 

“It is one thing to read about the disgrace of American penology, and quite another thing to see it for yourself.

In 1967, Danny Lyon turned his camera toward life in American prisons. Conversations with the Dead reflects fourteen months he spent looking and listening inside six Texas penitentiaries.

Free to enter the prisons at any time of day or night, Lyon moved among the prisoners as they functioned in groups, and as they existed in isolation. He photographed men in their cells, in the fields, working, eating, daydreaming-passing so much time. Befriending them, he records the personal testimonies of their lives and the official documents which condemn them to living death.

In the course of his unprecedented journey through the Texas prisons, Lyon met Billy McCune. At forty-two, McCune had already served eighteen years of a life sentence. He is a monument to the human spirit: a survivor of wretchedness unbounded; a victor over despair so great that he castrated himself. Billy McCune's paintings and writings reveala compassionate consciousness which confounds the "justice" which brands him "criminal."

This shattering portrait of oppression and futility must be recognized as a plea to American society - the ultimate warden of all our prisons.
As photojournalism, Conversations with the Dead easily stands beside such books as James Agee's and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Erskine Caldwell's and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces.” -From the dust jacket flap

Lyon quote from back dust jacket :
"I've tried with whatever power I had to make this picture of imprisonment as distressing as it is in reality. The few times I doubted the wisdom of my attitude, I had only to visit someone in his cell to straighten out my mind. I had been warned at the outset not to let the men con me. I am told that I have not seen what these men have done on the outside. That is true. I saw only what was before my eyes. And the material collected here doesn't approach for a moment the feeling you get standing for two minutes in the corridor of Ellis."

Story notes the legacy of the book and McCune’s later release from prison.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/an-unfinished-prison-story

11 x 8 inches , 196 pages