Customer Reviews

Indian Nations

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I was saddened to read the negative review which appears above mine. This body of work is among Danny Lyons' finest achievements. Every photograph in Indian Nation is wrought with a compassion and closeness rarely attained by even the most sympathetic observers of our native people. The historical circumstances of America's natives are indeed sad. Conditions on American reservations are bleak. This is not news. Lyons approaches his subjects with neither judgment nor pathos, and has recorded them without succumbing to the pitfalls of romanticism. Societal, emotional, and aesthetic complexity are limned here for all to see. And if the reviewer above does not, then it is because he or she - for some strange reason - has chosen not to.

Danny Lyon has put together a collection of photographs that depict American Indians as the saddest and most hopeless people ever known to man. This supposed documentary photographer has obviously imposed his own visual aesthetic upon his subjects to exaggerate their poverty and despair. This collection of work is a pretentious "disease of the week" photo story. The only positive emotion found in these photos is the result of the reunion of a couple separated from each other by a prison sentence. Although American Indians face a plethora of problems they are among the most resilient people on the face of this earth. They smile, laugh and love, but Lyon chose to leave all of this out. It saddens me to see someone who has done admirable work in the past stoop to this level. Oh, by the way, Larry McMurty's introduction stinks as well. He states that drunken driving accidents are among the commonest of events on western American Indian Reservations.