To move through the world today is to be exposed constantly to images, symbols and messages. For photographers who possess the impulse to parse and translate this mass of visual information into a coherent and readable language, working now must feel both exhilarating and daunting.
“In Pursuit of Magic,” George Eastman Museum’s retrospective exhibition of the work of the late Nathan Lyons, seems to come at a perfect time. Lyons’s career-long interest in using sequences to create coherent bodies of work offers a lot for the contemporary photographer to think about. This is especially true of the digital color work he made in the last years of his life, between 2010 and 2016, when he was engaging with our image-saturated, highly politicized milieu. This collection of never-before-seen color photographs pays close attention to signage, ads, street art and graffiti. It’s as if Lyons were using the camera to edit the chaos of images and texts created by others into something understandable, with a meaning that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Photographing signage and symbols was something he had done throughout his career, but in later years it felt newly urgent.
Lyons is best-known for his efforts as a curator, writer and educator. He was hired by Beaumont Newhall to work at the George Eastman Museum and went on to become a curator there. He then founded the Visual Studies Workshop and cofounded the Society for Photographic Education, among many other achievements. But as the exhibition makes clear, Lyons’s own image-making formed the basis for his work as a teacher and curator. While still an English student at Alfred University, he learned László Moholy-Nagy’s concept of image sequencing (“The single picture loses its separate identity and…becomes a structural element of the related whole which is the thing itself.”) through John Wood, a design professor who studied with Moholy-Nagy and then taught Lyons. The sequence became an essential part of Lyons’s work. His hope in creating a sequence, he said once, was that you, the reader, would “hit something and have to go back to check something that you saw previously, or when you get to the end, the motivation is to go back to the beginning. These are all things that I’m concerned about when I’m working on a sequence.”
This retrospective exhibition, which includes a catalogue co-published by the Eastman Museum and University of Texas Press, functions similarly. It offers us a look at Lyons’s final work, which sends us back to the beginning to search his career again for new levels of meaning.
—Conor Risch
In Pursuit of Magic
By Nathan Lyons
George Eastman Museum
Through June 9
