Brad Pitt buys Danny Lyon photo at Paris Photo LA
The Seventh Dog photographer's 1962 print of Clarksdale Police proves a hit with the 12 Years a Slave producer
We've been talking a lot lately about the importance of Danny Lyon's huge body of campaigning photographic work dating back to the early 1960s. It's all written about by Danny and printed beautifully in our new career retrospective with him, The Seventh Dog which you can learn more about and buy here.
So far we've brought you stories about the photographs Danny shot with Muhammad Ali, Inside the Texas Department of Corrections, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, his more recent documentation of the Occupy Movement and what advice Hunter S Thompson gave him when he joined the notorious Outlaws motorcycle gang to shoot the iconic Bikeriders photo series. So naturally we were happy to hear that the book was a huge hit at the recent Paris Photo LA Photo Fair.
As you can see from our pictures, Etherton Gallery dedicated its entire booth to Danny Lyon's work and Danny himself turned up to sign copies of The Seventh Dog. By all accounts it was a great success and some local celebs even swung by, among them Brit actor Gary Oldman who bought two copies of The Seventh Dog and none other than Brad Pitt who bought a print of Danny's 1962 photograph of a group of police officers in Clarksdale Mississipi that features in the book. Read our story on how Danny managed to get that shot here.
Pitt is currently working with talk Show host Oprah Winfrey on a movie about the African-American Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The film, provisionally titled Selma, tells the story of a group of black marchers who attempt to walk from Selma in Alabama, to nearby Montgomery in order to gain the right to vote in 1965. Lyon was shooting a lot in the south at the time as you can see in the book.
However, it was experience filming the Oscar winning 12 Years A Slave that Terry Etherton thinks spurred the Danny Lyon purchase. We spoke to Terry who told us:
"It's true, Brad Pitt was in our booth at the VIP opening on Thursday. He spent about 20 minutes looking at our show. We talked about various pictures and he seemed most interested in the Civil Rights work. He purchased the image in Clarksdale, Mississippi of the cop giving the finger.
"I asked him why that image and he reminded me about them shooting 12 Years a Slave in the area where the picture was made. Brad Pitt produced that film and makes a short appearance in it. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture this year. So that choice made sense.
"He had his assistant pick up the picture at the end of the show. We found him to be humble, sincere and very unpretentious. And, of course, handsome. When word got out, Terry told us, "we had all of the dealers asking us about it!"
Would you like to own your own limited edition Danny Lyon collector's editon print? You can do that here. You can also buy a copy of The Seventh Dog here and you can read our interview with Paris Photo LA director Julien Frydman here.