It's been a little over half a century since
Danny Lyon
peeked out the window of his Lower Manhattan apartment one morning.
The image of the neighborhood that was beginning to be dismantled by an army of workers, cranes, excavators and demolition machinery lit up his mind, as he was looking for a subject of inspiration for his work as a photographer.
And he took to the street.
They were finishing the 60s and speculation was not alien to this corner of New York.
It was here that the Dutch, who were shipwrecked on the shore of the Hudson River in 1613, built the first European settlement in Manhattan.
Since then, new buildings have been devouring their predecessors.
So until the middle of the 20th century, when the brick and steel business decided to take a colossal bite out of the area.
At the hand of David Rockefeller
and with the excuse of his economic and social revitalization, more than 24 hectares that housed the oldest part of the city were destroyed, with buildings that have stood since the Civil War.
In the midst of the drama, Lyon allowed himself to be guided by the lens of his camera through the maze of rubble, collapsed blocks, and hollowed-out buildings.
His
loafer
wandering
through streets that mutated into dusty rubbish heaps followed the path opened by the likes of
Walker Evans, Robert Frank, William Klein and Garry Winogrand
, giving a boost to the new documentary.
The rooms of the ICO Museum
show that angular work that is complemented by the first images of the photographer, taken on a trip to Europe in 1959, with some photos of Spain.
Photograph of Danny Lyon in the exhibition of the ICO Museum in Madrid.
Let's go back to Lower Manhattan.
With the faith of the explorer and the meticulousness of the archaeologist, Danny Lyon sculpted the memory of a space that was lost forever.
Downed buildings, unsheltered streets of personnel,
"from which everyone had left, even the dogs and rats,"
as the photographer recounted in the journal he wrote of his adventure.
Closed shops and hollow hotels, houses still clinging to shreds of missing lives, walls that hide their filth behind a children's drawing or a photo of Marilyn.
Nothing new that hadn't happened before.
Nothing that doesn't keep happening right now in any city.
In the first part of the exhibition curated by himself, Danny Lyon shows an empty city not unlike any capital in the world 53 years later.
The photographs that hang on the walls of the ICO Museum are a mirror in which the New York of this strange and pandemic 2020 is reflected.
Also the Wuhan, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin or London of the past confinement.
Cities that were forcibly emptied last spring by another no less ferocious demolition, that of its inhabitants besieged by nanoperarians who instead of a construction helmet wear an unmistakable crown.
Human beings appear in the second part of the show.
Cyclopean workers busy with demolition,
children capable of encountering the game in the midst of chaos, marauders who appear inside houses abandoned to their fate.
They all belong to the dust and debris that took over Lower Manhattan in 1967, although they are no different from those who live there and here today.
Squatters in T-shirts and sports shoes, bearded young men like the photographer himself, who portrays himself in an abandoned hotel room, troubled workers who stop their work for a moment to take a cigarette or play a joke on top of a pile of rubble.
They inhabited a New York that disappeared half a century ago, but they could be in right now.
From that ruin arose the vertigo of the World Trade Center, symbol of the power of the economic capital of America.
The earthy bricks that the workers were lovingly rescued gave way to an outburst of concrete, glass and steel.
His pride did not last long;
At the beginning of the third millennium, a jumble of twisted beams, ash, dust, and debris once again took over Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.
It was on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers were turned into smoking torches, then nothing, from the impact of the two commercial planes
from the Al Qaeda attack.
Not twenty years have passed and half a dozen buildings stand on the site they occupied, over which the One World Trade Center looms, the tallest skyscraper in the United States and the sixth in the world.
Unable to sleep, New York continues to gallop aboard its mad frenzy.
The wild speculation whose beginnings Danny Lyon documents in this work as well.
Photograph of Danny Lyon in the exhibition of the ICO Museum in Madrid.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
Architecture
culture
Photography
CulturePhotographs to walk around the city and among the people
LiteratureCoetzee, unpublished portrait of the adolescent photographer
CultureManu Brabo: "The photo in the Ice Palace? A pine box has no right to any privacy"
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